Description
Book SynopsisThrailkill offers a new understanding of late-nineteenth-century American literary realism that draws on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, positioning her argument against the emotionless interpretations of the New Critics.
Trade ReviewThis is a truly important project of reading realism through somatic experience, including sensation, aesthetics, and physiology. Thrailkill offers bold interpretations of the relations between corporality and realism. Working at the intersections of modernity, genre, and history, Thrailkill challenges us to incorporate "physiological thinking" into our theories of affect and reading realism's effects on the body. An impressive response to the explosion of work on sentimental and sensational fictions. -- Dale Bauer, Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Thrailkill opens up fresh ways of thinking about our whole aesthetic experience—meaning our whole body-and-mind experience—by combining contemporary theories of emotion with surprising readings of literature and philosophy from a century ago. The book excitingly reorients our understanding American literary realism, and it uses this literature to advance our current discussions of the place of affect in writing and reading. -- Randall Knoper, author of
Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of PerformanceTable of ContentsIntroduction: The "Affective Fallacy" Fallacy The Entanglements of Two Cultures Literature and Neurology, 1860-1910 Rethinking Emotion 1. "The Zest, the Tingle, the Excitement of Reality" Toward a New Conceptual Genealogy for American Literary Realism "Being Moved": Modernity, Evolution, and the Reflex Arc Laughter, Reflection, and Realization in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2. Statistical Pity: Elsie Venner and the Controversy over Childbed Fever The Case against Contagion Representing "Ontological Shadows" Holmes's "Algebra of Human Nature" Pathological Particularity in the Novel Coda: Anecdote and Abstraction 3. Fear and Epistemology: Tracking the Train of Feeling in A Mortal Antipathy From Physiognomy to Physiology Excess and Dissolution of the Nervous System Embodied Memory and the Pathogenic Secret The Forensic Self 4. Nervous Effort: Gilman, Crane, and the Psychophysical Pathologies of Everyday Life Freud, Feminist Reading, and Interrogative Criticism A Physiological Approach to Nervousness Effort, Agitation, Aesthetics Fracture and Fabrication: Crane's The Red Badge of Courage Coda: Reconstruction and "The Yellow Wallpaper" 5. "Mindless" Pleasure: Embodied Music in The Awakening and Theron Ware New Varieties of Religious Experience Theron Ware and the Ironic Rhythm of the Sick Soul Kate Chopin's Lyrical "Gospel of Relaxation" Music and the Sounding Board of the Body The Rhythm of Desire in The Awakening The Pleasures of "The Storm" 6. Corporeal Wonder: The Occult Entrancements of The Wings of the Dove Charming Milly From Trance to Transference--and Back Again William James and Mrs. Piper: The Medium Is the Message "Tremendous Rites of Nullification" Conclusion: Burning Issues Notes Acknowledgments Index
