Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Associationism, Affect and Literary Authority -- 1 Feeling Bodies: Associationism and the Anti-Metaphorics of Materiality -- 2 Symbolic Bodies: The Storyteller, Memory and Suffering in Boz's 'The Hospital Patient' -- 3 Metaphoric Bodies: The Professional Author, Sensation and Serialisation in Great Expectations -- 4 Plastic Bodies: The Scientist, Vital Mechanics and Ethical Habits of Character in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone -- 5 Represented Bodies: The Lawyer, Conclusions and Circumstantial Evidence in Lady Audley's Secret -- 6 Caring Bodies: The Reformer, Sartorial Exchange and the Work of the Novel in Walter Besant's Children of Gibeon -- Coda: In Defence of Victorian Optimism -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary
Explores how Victorian novelists used the science of feeling to understand reading as an embodied process that cultivates empathy
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 222-241) and index