Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel

by Dorothee Birke

Overview

The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110307634
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	08/08/2016
Series:	linguae & litterae Series
Pages:	267
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.03(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dorothee Birke, Univ. of Freiburg, Germany, and Univ. of Aarhus, Denmark.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Abbreviations of Titles xi

Part I

Chapter 1 Writing the Reader 3

Four Approaches to Reading 8

The Significance of the Quixotic Reader's Gender 15

The Quixotic Plot 18

Self-Reflexivity Revisited 25

Chapter 2 The Reader in the Text: Dramatizing Literary Communication 30

The Projection of Reading Stances 33

Narratorial Commentary and the Performance of Authorship 41

Part II

Chapter 3 The Ambivalent Rise of the Novel Reader: Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote 55

Novel, Romance, and Reading around 1750 57

Sex, Violence, and Arabella: Debating the Physical Impact of Reading 62

Models of Virtue? Lennox and Johnson 68

Great Expectations? Reading as a Socially Embedded Practice 78

Probing Problems of Authority and Instruction 83

Chapter 4 The Institutionalization of Novel Reading: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey 91

The Uses of Parody: Restructuring the Quixotic Plot 94

Catherine Morland and the Politics of the Didactic 101

Reading and the Channelling of Emotions 109

Consumerism and Communities of Taste 113

Reconsidering the Defense of the Novel 118

Chapter 5 Psychologizing Reading as Social Behaviour: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife 126

Reading as a Bad Habit: Idleness and Licentiousness 130

Isabel Sleaford and Emma Bovary 135

Young Isabel and Reading as Compensation 142

Isabel and Roland: The Temptations of Companionship 149

Intertextuality Reloaded 155

Sigismund Smith: Sensation Fiction and the Pleasures of Reading 159

Part III

Chapter 6 Looking Forward, Looking Back: Novel Reading in the Twenty-First Century 169

Chapter 7 Taking Stock of the Novel Reader's History: Ian McEwan's Atonement 175

Briony as a Quixotic Reader/Writer and the Problem of Cognition 176

Achieving Atonement? Briony's Ethics of Storytelling 181

Narrative Situation(s) and the Ethics of Form 187

Atonement as Homage and Challenge to the History of the Novel 191

Cecilia and Robbie: The Sacralization of Reading 195

Chapter 8 The Nostalgic Future of Novel Reading: Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader 201

The Quixote in Reverse 202

Common and Uncommon Readers 208

From the London Review of Books to the Internet: Media! Environments and Reading as Cultural Affiliation 213

Emphasizing Medial Difference: The Uncommon Reader and Stephen Frears's The Queen 220

Concluding Remarks 225

Works Cited 234

Index of Names 254