Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction

Abstract

Explores how Victorian novelists used the science of feeling to understand reading as an embodied process that cultivates empathy Contextualizes the embodiment of Victorian novelists, critics, and readers through the scientific conversations around them Connects ethical philosophies and scientific discourses about empathy – both historical and contemporary Rethinks Victorian responses to novels in both the academy and popular press Builds on twenty-first century conversations about affect, language and 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.