Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority

Explores how Victorian novelists used the science of feeling to understand reading as an embodied process that cultivates empathyContextualizes the embodiment of Victorian novelists, critics, and readers through the scientific conversations around themConnects ethical philosophies and scientific dis...

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1. Verfasser: Katz, Peter (VerfasserIn)
Format: Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press [2022]
Schriftenreihe:Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture : ECSVC
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Zusammenfassung:Explores how Victorian novelists used the science of feeling to understand reading as an embodied process that cultivates empathyContextualizes the embodiment of Victorian novelists, critics, and readers through the scientific conversations around themConnects ethical philosophies and scientific discourses about empathy – both historical and contemporaryRethinks Victorian responses to novels in both the academy and popular pressBuilds on twenty-first century conversations about affect, language and empathyReading 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
Beschreibung:Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2022)
Beschreibung:1 online resource (256 pages)
ISBN:9781474476225
DOI:10.1515/9781474476225