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Author:

Katz, Peter J., author.

Title:

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

Publisher:

Edinburgh University Press,

Copyright Date:

2022

Description:

vii, 248 pages ; 24 cm.

Subject:

1800-1899
English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.
Sentimentalism in literature.
Association of ideas in literature.
Empathy in literature.
Books and reading--Great Britain--History--19th century.
Reading--Great Britain--History--History--19th century.
Literature and morals--Great Britain--History--19th century.
History.
Sentimentalism in literature.
Reading--Psychological aspects.
Literature and morals.
Books and reading.
Association of ideas in literature.
Empathy in literature.
English fiction.
Great Britain.
Literary criticism.
History.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Literary criticism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 222-241) and index.

Contents:

Coda: In Defence of Victorian Optimism. 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.

Summary:

"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."--Publisher description.

Series:

Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture

ISBN:

1474476201
9781474476201

OCLC:

(OCoLC)1293059746

Locations:

OVUX522 -- University of Iowa Libraries (Iowa City)