Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority - Paperback

by Peter Katz (Author)

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.

Author Biography

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.