Description
The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.
Chapter
Self-Reflexivity Revisited
Chapter 2. The Reader in the Text: Dramatizing Literary Communication
The Projection of Reading Stances
Narratorial Commentary and the Performance of Authorship
Chapter 3. The Ambivalent Rise of the Novel Reader: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote
Novel, Romance, and Reading around 1750
Sex, Violence, and Arabella: Debating the Physical Impact of Reading
Models of Virtue? Lennox and Johnson
Great Expectations? Reading as a Socially Embedded Practice
Probing Problems of Authority and Instruction
Chapter 4. The Institutionalization of Novel Reading: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey
The Uses of Parody: Restructuring the Quixotic Plot
Catherine Morland and the Politics of the Didactic
Reading and the Channelling of Emotions
Consumerism and Communities of Taste
Reconsidering the Defense of the Novel
Chapter 5. Psychologizing Reading as Social Behaviour: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife
Reading as a Bad Habit: Idleness and Licentiousness
Isabel Sleaford and Emma Bovary
Young Isabel and Reading as Compensation
Isabel and Roland: The Temptations of Companionship
Sigismund Smith: Sensation Fiction and the Pleasures of Reading
Chapter 6. Looking Forward, Looking Back: Novel Reading in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 7. Taking Stock of the Novel Reader’s History: Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Briony as a Quixotic Reader/Writer and the Problem of Cognition
Achieving Atonement? Briony’s Ethics of Storytelling
Narrative Situation(s) and the Ethics of Form
Atonement as Homage and Challenge to the History of the Novel
Cecilia and Robbie: The Sacralization of Reading
Chapter 8. The Nostalgic Future of Novel Reading: Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader
Common and Uncommon Readers
From the London Review of Books to the Internet: Medial Environments and Reading as Cultural Affiliation
Emphasizing Medial Difference: The Uncommon Reader and Stephen Frears’s The Queen