Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction

Abstract

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. The mid-century emergence of academic literary studies exacerbated a debate over the source of literary authority. The academy and professional critics argued that to understand the truth of texts requires interpretive hermeneutic techniques acquired through labour and attention. 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 studied mental phenomena through physiology – to understand language as a physiological process that draws bodies together. For these authors, because language is embodied, if readers could learn to care for characters, they would better care for the real people around them. Emotional reading cultivated empathy in popular readers, and imbued popular fiction with cultural value. Reading Bodies uses affect theory, surface reading, and history and philosophy of science to contextualise the intersection between scientific treatises, nineteenth-century literary criticism, and Victorian novels. At the same time, it historicizes the techniques of literary study and how the nineteenth century defined the tools of academic literary authority.