The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature (review)

This is a superb collection of essays on an engaging topic, quite simply the feeling of reading. Addressing this topic from numerous perspectives, the essays share a focus on both reading and the Victorian period. Within these shaping terms, we enjoy a wonderfully diverse and illuminating collection that becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

Editor Rachel Ablow offers a succinct introduction that nicely sets the stage for the significant work to come. Ablow and her fellow contributors take issue with the model that has tended to dominate critical inquiry into the reading practice, that of a subject interpellated into a social order confirming “the novel-reader in his identity as ‘liberal subject’” (1). Against this Foucauldian influence, which has been given special weight in Victorian studies through the work of D. A. Miller, The Feeling of Reading asks us to consider whether “micromanagement involves autonomy as well as determination, escape from as well as assimilation to the world outside the text” (2). As a long-serving administrator who has credited (or blamed) the Victorian novel for interpellating me into an ethos of duty and self-sacrifice, I rejoice that I am now invited to resume my passion for these novels without necessarily being constructed anew by a rhetoric of duty. Or, at least, I am encouraged to see myself as producer of these texts as much as a production of them. Readers are invited to embrace a model of reading that is neither paranoid nor reparative—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “necessary corrective [as Ablow argues] to the suspicion that characterizes many Foucauldian readings.” It is a mode “instead attuned to a different model of historical specificity: interested in what nineteenth-century readers and writers thought they were doing,” how they thought about the experience of reading, and what they regarded as its pleasures and dangers (3).

The essays that follow take the many pathways opened up by these new questions, rejecting in advance either “strict historicism or dogmatic formalism” (4), committed instead to discovering the ways in which the reading practices encouraged by a variety of Victorian texts return us to affective experience.

The collection opens with Nicholas Dames’s intriguing re-evaluation of the Victorian critics’ practice of inserting long quotations from a text being reviewed. From the perspective of a late-twentieth or early-twenty-first-century critical practice of close reading, it looks like unnecessary padding by overburdened reviewers eager to eat up space. But as Dames argues this is not necessarily why critics quoted at length, and readers did not respond with impatience. Rather, in Dames’s insightful reading, the practice was not an issue of textual length but of time, that is, a sufficient length of time to give readers a feeling of the work itself: as if to say, this is what this novel feels like.

To follow Dames’s essay with Kate Flint’s opening sentence, “reading has the power to transport one,” seems quite right, but Flint will take that concept of transportation in another direction: to “imaginative voyaging,” more specifically asking “what does it mean to read when one is away from home?” (27, 28). This intriguing question already takes us leagues from where Dames left us, and it is this critical voyaging that makes the collection so rewarding to read. Flint’s is only one perspective on the ways in which works might be used to mediate experience or insulate against feelings a reader wishes to avoid. Leah Price’s astute analysis of the book as a prop to forestall interaction or intimacy in Anthony Trollope’s comedies of manners will resonate with all readers who have resolutely hauled out long tomes to discourage conversation on transcontinental flights, where reading can become a way to ignore other passengers. This shock of recognition leads to the critical question with which Price concludes—the challenge facing historians of reading...