Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority(Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture)

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Associationism, Affect, and Literary Authority 1. Feeling Bodies: Associationism and the Anti-Metaphorics of Materiality 2. Symbolic Bodies: Memory, The Storyteller, 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

About the Author :
Peter Katz is Assistant Professor of Humanities at California Northstate University. His other work has appeared in forthcoming edited collections on pedagogy and Victorian culture, and in Victorian Literature and Culture, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment.

Review :
Peter Katz explores how Victorian-era readers and authors thought about what it feels like to read; how those feelings – as they are registered through the body and reflected on by the mind – are related to knowledge production; and what those feelings can do. After your encounter with this book, it won’t be possible to think about readers’ and characters’ bodies, language, or literary studies in the same way. A dazzling achievement. Peter J. Katz’s study is a timely intervention in Victorian studies, but also literary studies as a whole, to remind scholars of the importance of affect and feelings when encountering a text... Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction is an important addition to Victorian scholarship and expresses an urgent call for an attitude towards (historical) texts that is caring and empathetic. Throughout Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction, Katz shows a deft command of the scientific, literary, and periodical press textual traditions. He weaves together these genres to continually return us to the experience of reading in the nineteenth century. This book is an important addition to the conversation around Victorian psychology and science, especially with its focus on why we read and what happens when we read.