Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction - (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture) by Peter Katz (Paperback)

About the Book

Explores how Victorian novelists used the science of feeling to understand reading as an embodied process that cultivates empathy.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.

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.