Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism - Hardcover

Thrailkill, Jane F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674025121 ISBN 13: 9780674025127

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2007

Synopsis

What happens when the cerebral--that is, theories of literature and of affect--encounters the corporeal, the human body? In this study by Jane Thrailkill, what emerges from the convergence is an important vision of late-nineteenth-century American realist literature and the role of emotion and physiology in literary criticism.

Affecting Fictions offers a new understanding of American literary realism that draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Thrailkill positions herself against the emotionless interpretations of the New Critics. Taking as her point of departure realist works of medicine, psychology, and literature, she argues that nineteenth-century readers and critics would have taken it for granted that texts engaged both mind and body. Feeling, she writes, is part of interpretation.

Examining literary works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thrailkill explores the connections among the aesthetic, emotion, consciousness, and the body in readings that illuminate lesser-known works such as "Elsie Venner" and that resuscitate classics such as "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Focusing on pity, fear, nervousness, pleasure, and wonder, Thrailkill makes an important contribution to the growing body of critical work on affect and aesthetics, presenting a case for the indispensability of emotions to the study of fiction.

About this title

About the Author:

?ane F. Thrailkill is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Review:

This is a truly important project of reading realism through somatic experience, including sensation, aesthetics, and physiology. Thrailkill offers bold interpretations of the relations between corporality and realism. Working at the intersections of modernity, genre, and history, Thrailkill challenges us to incorporate "physiological thinking" into our theories of affect and reading realism's effects on the body. An impressive response to the explosion of work on sentimental and sensational fictions. (Dale Bauer, Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)

Thrailkill opens up fresh ways of thinking about our whole aesthetic experience―meaning our whole body-and-mind experience―by combining contemporary theories of emotion with surprising readings of literature and philosophy from a century ago. The book excitingly reorients our understanding American literary realism, and it uses this literature to advance our current discussions of the place of affect in writing and reading. (Randall Knoper, author of Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0674025121
• ISBN 13: 9780674025127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320