Perverse attachments : reading fiction around 1800
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation investigates a resilient trope in the theory of reading--the notion that readers "participate" in the fictions they experience--by concentrating on a moment in British literary history when this idea exercised a special cultural force. In the decades that witnessed the novel's quantitative rise, techniques for soliciting the reader's engagement multiplied, from the literature of suspense to the immersive powers of free indirect discourse. By uncovering the range and complexity of these techniques, my dissertation challenges the rubrics--in particular the concept of character identification--through which reader participation is usually understood. The works I consider belong to a period before the emerging doctrine of aesthetic autonomy had secured its hold and to a set of genres that fall largely outside its claims. Rather than celebrating the aesthetic as a domain of disinterested free play, they exploit the suppressed interactivity harbored by narrative form: its capacity to solicit the desires of its readers even as it curtails their effects. In the basic narratological divisions between reader, narrator, and character, writers discovered the formal resources for generating "perverse attachments, " situations in which a person's strong desires affix to things she is not a part of or cannot control. From the sense of complicity William Godwin invites his readers to share in Caleb Williams's confession to the ineffectual political careers of Walter Scott's passive heroes, these vicarious investments dominate the representational program of Romantic fiction and the experience of reading it. In an analogy these works pursued, such relations also defined the unfulfilled experience of being a political subject in the period between the French Revolution and the first significant expansion of the franchise in Britain under the Reform Act of 1832. Maneuvering between the alternatives staked out in current debates about reading (irony or identification, suspicion or repair), my dissertation focuses on states of complicity, embarrassment, and longing that connect the phenomenology of fiction to the psychodynamics of collective life.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Eccles, Anastasia |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Bender, John B |
| Degree supervisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Bender, John B |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Cohen, Margaret |
| Degree committee member | Cohen, Margaret |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anastasia Eccles. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Anastasia Martine Eccles
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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