Perverse Attachments - (Thinking Literature) by Anastasia Eccles (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This new theory of reader response describes "perverse attachment," or the powerful desire to intervene in a story, even when it is impossible to do so.

Fiction has long inspired resistance in its readers: making them, for example, wish for a different plot, cringe at a moment of social discomfort, or itch to warn a character about an approaching calamity. These are symptoms of a condition that Anastasia Eccles calls "perverse attachment," in which a person feels an urge to act on something beyond their control. Eccles theorizes this form of frustrated agency as a constitutive part of the experience of reading fiction, especially under the influence of literary sentimentalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was also, significantly, a defining aspect of the mass politics that emerged in the same period, which rested on the demands of new political subjects to participate in a process that excluded them.

Perverse Attachments recovers a repertoire of aesthetic responses keyed to the psychodynamics of modern political life: complicity, suspense, historical regret, and cringing. Combining identification and disidentification, immersion and detachment, these experiences challenge deep-seated binaries in our theories of reading and point toward a new account of the political stakes of literary form.

Through readings of works by Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and others Eccles shows how this distinctive aesthetic and political relation shaped the major genres of Romantic fiction and gave rise to some of the novel's characteristic forms, like the character type of the witness-protagonist and the techniques of free indirect discourse. The result is a major work in the theory of the novel and the history of readerly experience.

Review Quotes

"Perverse Attachments makes an important contribution to the history of the novel. Even beyond that, it addresses larger questions about how we can understand the momentous transitions that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century in how power, privacy, and judgment are exercised. Eccles excels in moving between and beyond existing critical frames to offer original and absorbing accounts of the phenomenology of reading, and of the effects produced by particular narrative forms and devices."

"Perverse Attachments is a masterful piece of scholarship about the power of fiction. Eccles has written a book that promises to alter the way scholars of the novel understand pivotal innovations in fictional form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She works against the grain of conventional wisdom about narrative desire, subject formation, and the pleasures of literary form. In her hands, familiar but seemingly disparate features of literature suddenly coalesce, revealing a persistent concern: the 'predicament' of being profoundly implicated or attached even as we remain blocked or excluded from intervening."

"A vital contribution to the history and theory of reading, Perverse Attachments is also an outstanding study of the novel in British Romanticism. Eccles links the sentimental predicament of novel readers, moved to intervene in a scenario they cannot enter, with the state of the disenfranchised subject in a new age of mass political experience. Her at once subtle and compelling argument shows how a medley of experimental forms and genres--political and historical novels, terror tales, the novel of manners--composed a turning point in modern aesthetic and political sensibility."

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