Book review: "Affective Worlds": Writing, Feeling and Nineteenth-Century Literature by John Hughes
Burdett, Carolyn (2013) Book review: "Affective Worlds": Writing, Feeling and Nineteenth-Century Literature by John Hughes. Victorian Studies 55 (3), ISSN 0042-5222.
Abstract
The emotional freight of nineteenth-century writing is at once obvious and yet a surprisingly tricky topic for scholars. During the last decade or so scholarly interest in emotions has burgeoned. But it sometimes seems as if philosophers and historians have proved more ready and able than their literary colleagues to confront the methodological challenge emotions present. While the importance of affective involvement in reading is readily enough acknowledged, there is still unease or even suspicion about emotional responses to literature, largely left in place from the modernist critique of Victorian sentimentality. Things are changing, however, and John Hughes’s Affective Worlds: Writing, Feeling & Nineteenth-Century Literature is a recent addition to the growing scholarship on literature and affect (Hughes cites Susan L. Feagin’s Reading with Feeling [1996], Jenefer Robinson’s Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art [2005], and Suzanne Keen’s Empathy and the Novel [2007] as precursor texts). His stated aim is to develop “a mode of ‘affective reading’” through which to reencounter the canonical nineteenth-century writers who populate his study (1): William Blake, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Nineteenth-Century Studies, Centre for |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 25 Feb 2014 17:08 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2023 12:34 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/9254 |
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