Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature
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- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Publication date:
- 05 January 2026
- 19 February 2026
- ISBN:
- 9781009380430
- 9781009380423
- Dimensions:
- (228 x 152 mm)
- Weight & Pages:
- 0.52kg, 250 Pages
- Dimensions:
- Weight & Pages:
- Subjects:
- Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
- Series:
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
You may already have access via personal or institutional login- Subjects:
- Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
- Series:
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
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Book description
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.
Reviews
‘… this is a most insightful book whose conclusions are so important they must be brought into the general consensus of any literary study of the period.’
Cliff Cunningham Source: Sun News Austin
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