Library Catalog
Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com

Bodies and Books : Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America / Gillian Silverman.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2012]Copyright date: ©2012Description: 1 online resource (240 p.) : 3 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812244151
  • 9780812206180
Subject(s): Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface. Reading and the Search for Oneness -- Introduction. The Fantasy of Communion -- Chapter 1. Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading -- Chapter 2. Books and the Dead -- Chapter 3. Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville's Pierre -- Chapter 4. Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative -- Chapter 5. "The Polishing Attrition": Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner -- Epilogue. No End in Sight -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary: In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading-and particularly book reading-precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world-an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity-the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world.While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812206180

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface. Reading and the Search for Oneness -- Introduction. The Fantasy of Communion -- Chapter 1. Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading -- Chapter 2. Books and the Dead -- Chapter 3. Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville's Pierre -- Chapter 4. Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative -- Chapter 5. "The Polishing Attrition": Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner -- Epilogue. No End in Sight -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading-and particularly book reading-precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world-an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity-the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world.While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2022)