The Visceral Novel Reader: A Cultural History of Embodied Novel Reading in Britain, 1688-1927
Final Report Abstract
Reading novels for pleasure involves strong, visceral feelings. The problem is that visceral responses to novel have long been seen as an obstacle to, rather than a part of, interpretation. The present project titled “the visceral novel reader” explores the entanglement of novels and readers’ sense of having and being a body, i.e. readers’ embodiment. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, we presuppose that embodiment marks the experiential horizon that any reader brings (wittingly or not) to the perusal of a novel. A reader seated in their armchair imaging the world inside the novel is a case in point. Phenomenologically, this posture can be described as a double sensation in which the reader experiences their lived body as simultaneously passive and active. On this account of embodiment, the research questions are: How did novelists foreground human relations to bodies in their novels? How did and do novels cue real-life readers’ embodiment? To answer these questions, the project also draws on mimesis in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology, which covers the entire arc from author, via composition, to reader. Within this framework, the transition from composition to reception (from configuration to refiguration) encompasses readers’ novel-induced rehearsal of sensory perceptions, and their potential application of the reading experience to real life. The findings of the project show that influential novelists, including Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy and Henry James enriched their composition increasingly with cues that tapped into readers’ embodied imagination, to increasingly visceral effect. Monika Class’s seven single-authored articles on hermeneutical phenomenology and her ongoing book-size study “The Visceral Novel Reader: Past and Present Co-creations of Embodied Imagination” (working title) and Natasha Anderson’s two single-authored articles and her doctoral dissertation titled “The Reader, the Body, and the Book: Visceral Reading Experiences in the Victorian Novel” confirm the hypothesis that visceral responses to novels were part and parcel of the rise of the novel to unprecedented literary dominance in the Victorian era, and to verbal art in literary Modernism. In addition, the contributions in the special issue guest-edited by Monika Class, “Trace: Embodied Approaches to the Novel in English”, suggest that the visceral-novel-reader model is a helpful intervention in the current debate about the limits of critique and suspicion because it builds on Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of recuperation”; and gauges the co-creative interplay between reader’s embodiment and trace-like representations in anglophone novels, dating from the Victorian era and the twenty-first century.
Publications
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Annika Mann. Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print.. The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 53(2), 212-214.
Class, Monika
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"'tis by Comparison we can Judge and Chuse [sic!]": Incomparable Oroonoko. Edition Kulturwissenschaft, 125-148. transcript Verlag.
Class, Monika
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23 Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791). Handbook of the British Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century, 417-434. De Gruyter.
Class, Monika
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Blood and Footprints: Traces of Embodiment in Jude the Obscure and The Woman in White. English Studies, 104(4), 589-611.
Anderson, Natasha
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Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, 75-96. Springer International Publishing.
Anderson, Natasha
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Introducing Trace as an Embodied Approach to the Novel in English. English Studies, 104(4), 579-588.
Class, Monika
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Traces of the Queer Child inShuggie Bain. English Studies, 104(4), 649-666.
Class, Monika
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Upright Posture and Gendered Styles of Body Movements in The Mill on the Floss. Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, 121-143. Springer International Publishing.
Class, Monika
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‘Trace: Embodied Approaches to the Novel in English.’ English Studies 104.4 (2023).
Class, Monika
