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 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,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Katz, Peter ca. 20./21. Jh (Author)
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:English
Published: Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2022
Series:Edinburgh critical studies in Victorian culture
Subjects:
Online Access:BSB01
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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
Item Description:Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 18 Nov 2022)
Physical Description:1 Online-Ressource (vii, 248 Seiten)
ISBN:9781474476225

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