The Feeling of Reading

by Ablow, Rachel

• ISBN13: 9780472051076
• ISBN10: 0472051075
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-27
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

"This gathering of state-of-the-art work generates a convincing and compelling vision of the emerging state of the field." ---Daniel Hack, University of Michigan Through discussions of an array of materials ranging from diaries to critical essays to cartoons, the collected writings inThe Feeling of Readingexplore the wide range of ways in which Victorian readers thought about the act of reading. With innovative examinations of well-known works by authors such as George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and Lord Alfred Tennyson, the essays in this collection demonstrate that in the latter half of the 19th century, reading was commonly regarded as much as an affective experience as a way to convey information or increase understanding. By virtue of renewed attention to theexperienceof reading, rather than the information gained by the act,The Feeling of Readingdemonstrates reading's intriguing and mysterious nature---not just because of the individuality of the experience but because the consequences of that experience can never be fully determined in advance. In addition to its obvious interest to Victorian historians and literary critics, this collection should find a readership among historical and literary scholars interested in the history and theory of reading. Rachel Ablow is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Author Biography

Rachel Ablow is Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Feeling of Reading	p. 1
On Not Close Reading: The Prolonged Excerpt as Victorian Critical Protocol	p. 11
Traveling Readers	p. 27
Reader's Block: Trollope and the Book as Prop	p. 47
Mediated Involvement: John Stuart Mill's Antisocial Sociability	p. 69
Reciting Alice: What Is the Use of a Book without Poems?	p. 93
Over Worked, Worked Over: A Poetics of Fatigue	p. 114
The Impersonal Intimacy of Marius the Epicurean	p. 131
Reading and Re-reading: Wilde, Newman, and the Fiction of Belief	p. 157
Reading Feeling and the "Transferred Life": The Mill on the Floss	p. 179
Contributors	p. 207
Index	p. 209
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