- Description
- 1 online resource (vii, 248 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
- 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.
- Series Statement
- Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture
- Uniform Title
- Reading bodies in Victorian fiction (Online)
- Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture.
- Alternative Title
- Reading bodies in Victorian fiction (Online)
- Subject
- Note
- Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 18 Nov 2022).
- Access (note)
- Access restricted to authorized users.
- OCLC
- ssj0002828853
- Author
Katz, Peter J.
- Title
Reading bodies in Victorian fiction [electronic resource] : associationism, empathy and literary authority / Peter J. Katz.
- Imprint
Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
- Series
Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture
Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture.
- Access
Access restricted to authorized users.
- Connect to:
- Other Form:
Print version: 9781474476201