The Psychology of Reading and the Victorian Novel

Bibliographic Data

ID12880534
AuthorsDebra Gettelman (College of the Holy Cross, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume9
Issue2
Pages199-212
Publication date2012-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLiterature Compass (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00869.x
OpenAlexW1568117833
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited43

This article examines a growing body of work on the psychology of novel reading in the Victorian period by focusing on how three related fields have recently, simultaneously, turned their attention to readers’ minds: the history of reading; studies of psychology and literature; and, more surprisingly, studies of Victorian sociability. Across these fields, critics have found that Victorian readers were not always expected to pay attention: 19th‐century psychologists and observers of literary culture thought that many layers and vagaries of the reader’s consciousness and unconscious mind were at work in the reading process. Newly accessible, first‐hand accounts of reading experiences have also underscored that Victorian readers used books in unpredictable ways, often as a prompt for their own associations or to turn inward and reflect on social practice. Partly in response to the Foucauldian emphasis on the coerciveness of novel reading that long monopolized literary studies, critics have been redrawing 19th‐century reading history to include not reading, or perhaps not only reading, but also the ways novel reading afforded unique forms of self‐knowledge amidst the pressures and worries of the modern Victorian world

Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Unconscious mind · Victorian literature · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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