Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-38042-3
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Romanticism

When two people read together, what do they stand to learn not just about the book, but about each other? Representations of people reading together in Romantic literature often describe the act of sharing a book as a kind of litmus test of sympathy. Frequently, however, fictional readers end up misreading the text, or each other, or both. Stacey McDowell shows how Romantic writers, in questioning the assumptions lying behind the metaphorical sense of reading as sympathy, reflect on ideas of reading – its private or social nature and its capacity to foster fellow feeling – while also suggesting something about the literary qualities intrinsic to sympathy itself – its hermeneutic, narrative, and rhetorical strategies. She reveals what the literary portrayal of shared reading adds to histories of the book and moral philosophy, and how the effects of form and style aim to reproduce the shared experience of reading described.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McDowell, Stacey

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: reading minds; 1. Complicit reading: Hunt, Byron, and Dante's Paolo and Francesca; 2. Goethe's grammar of intimacy; 3. Wollstonecraft and Godwin, loving by the book; 4. Lamb's reading blunders; 5. Keats's interreading; Conclusion: reading together apart; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

McDowell, Stacey
Stacey McDowell is an Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University.