Wayward readers and voracious readers: a literary self-reflection on obsessive reading

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This study focuses on scenes of obsessive reading and the characters of wayward male and female readers which nineteenth-century authors presented to deal with contemporary critiques of the reading imagination. The study shows that these characters always express something more than a mere critique of reading: obsessive readers become part of a literary game regarding the status of fiction and increase the reader’s pleasure in reading. This study examines in detail the three dominant poetics of reading that authors developed in texts during the long nineteenth century: the metaleptic experiments of the Romantics, the emancipatory reading of works by realist female authors, and the hermetic reading required by fin de siècle prose. In doing so, the work describes how gender schemas associated with the principle of desire (for an erotic object and at the same time for a coherent meaning to the text) and national conflicts are projected into scenes involving obsessive reading.