Imagining Otherwise - by Debra Gettelman

About the Book

"From fan fiction to "relatability"--the assessment of novels based on how easy it is to imagine the represented experiences--the individual reader's imagination has become a determining part of the contemporary literary environment. Literary studies has a long history of critical approaches, from New Criticism to surface reading, devoted to minimizing the associations and inventiveness that readers bring to a text. Imagining Otherwise instead seeks to explain how we came to view fiction as available for imaginative appropriation in the first place. Gettelman argues for the Victorian roots of the core modernist belief that readers complete an author's vision. As novel readership expanded in the nineteenth century, many Victorian writers became frustrated with readers' formulaic expectations and sought to engage aesthetically with their readers' imaginations. Gettelman argues that the elevation of the novel as a genre began when writers started to incorporate, rather than exclude, the common reader's daydreams and emotions into their work. Taking a fresh look at works by Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, and Trollope, as well as some of their modernist successors (Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and others), Gettelman traces narrative techniques, including direct address, verb tense, syntax, and prose style, that reflect Victorian authors' changing perceptions of and engagement with their readers"--

Book Synopsis

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heights

As novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience--sometimes grudgingly--that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page.

Debra Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader's independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction. Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader's capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination.

As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader's imagination has become a determining element of today's literary environment. Imagining Otherwise takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.

Review Quotes

"Developed with substantial research . . . [Imagining Otherwise] situates novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot in foundational criticism related to readers both real and constructed."-- "Choice"

"This thoughtful, well-researched book appears at first glance counterintuitive, even perverse. It is that nineteenth-century novelists - or at least some of them - wrote in such a way that the reader is recognized, and sometimes welcomed, as a partner in imagining with the author. Debra Gettelman shows that the three great writers she chooses to discuss - Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and George Eliot - have a richer, closer and more complex relationship with their readers than has usually been thought. . . . [She] stimulates us readers to notice how these writers 'recognise and reckon with the inevitable presence of another imagination'."---Rosemary Ashton, Times Literary Supplement

"An inherently fascinating and thought-provoking read. . . . [and] a seminal work of ground-breaking scholarship."-- "Midwest Book Review"

About the Author

Debra Gettelman is associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross.