The Marriage of Minds : Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot

Rachel Ablow

ISBN 10: 0804754667 / ISBN 13: 9780804754668

Published by Stanford University Press Jun 2007, 2007

About this Item

Neuware - 'The Marriage of Minds' examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life.

Seller Inventory # 9780804754668

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Marriage of Minds : Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot
• Publisher: Stanford University Press Jun 2007
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804754667
• ISBN 13: 9780804754668
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu

About this title

Synopsis

The Marriage of Minds examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life. Through close readings of canonical texts in relation to the histories of sympathy, marriage, and reading, The Marriage of Minds begins to fill a long-standing gap between eighteenth-century philosophical notions of sympathy and twentieth-century psychoanalytic concepts of identification. It examines the wide variety of ways in which novels were understood to educate or reform readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it demonstrates how both the form of the Victorian novel and the experience supposed to result from that form were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage.

About the Author

Rachel Ablow is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY, Buffalo. Her work has appeared in Dickens Studies Annual and Novel: A Forum on Fiction.