The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living
Oct 2024 · Fordham Univ Press
Ebook
224
Pages
reportRatings and reviews aren’t verified Learn More
About this ebook
We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?
The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other.
Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.
The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.
The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other.
Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.
The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.
About the author
Adela Pinch is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (1996), and Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (2010).
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
