Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction

Know about the book -

Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction is written by Peter Katz and published by Edinburgh University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1474476228 (ISBN 10) and 9781474476225 (ISBN 13).

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.