Reading bodies in Victorian fiction : associationism, empathy and literary authority / Peter Katz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Katz, Peter, 1930- author.

Series:

Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture.

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Empathy in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 248 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh, Scotland : Edinburgh University Press, [2022]

Summary:

Explores how Victorian novelists used the science of feeling to understand reading as an embodied process that cultivates empathy. Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction challenges literary studies to attend to surfaces rather than interpretation through a history of how we came to think about emotion, empathy and reading fiction as intertwined ideas. Against professional readers, writers of popular fiction argued that emotional reading and sensational novels cultivated an ethics of care. They turned to Associationism - an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science that understood mental phenomena through physiology - to understand language as a physiological process that draws bodies together. Emotional reading cultivated empathy in popular readers, and imbued popular fiction with cultural value.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Associationism, Affect and Literary Authority

1 Feeling Bodies: Associationism and the Anti-Metaphorics of Materiality

2 Symbolic Bodies: The Storyteller, Memory and Suffering in Boz’s ‘The Hospital Patient’

3 Metaphoric Bodies: The Professional Author, Sensation and Serialisation in Great Expectations

4 Plastic Bodies: The Scientist, Vital Mechanics and Ethical Habits of Character in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

5 Represented Bodies: The Lawyer, Conclusions and Circumstantial Evidence in Lady Audley’s Secret

6 Caring Bodies: The Reformer, Sartorial Exchange and the Work of the Novel in Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon

Coda: In Defence of Victorian Optimism

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 18 Nov 2022).

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781474476232

1474476236

9781399518857

1399518852

9781474476225

1474476228

OCLC:

1336053826