We’re delighted to note that Nicholas Dames, Literature Compass Victorian Section Editor, and Frances Dolan, Literature Compass Editorial Board member, have each recently had new books published!
Nicholas Dames’ new book is entitled The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction:
How did the novel audience of the nineteenth century read? Answering that deceptively simple question is the purpose of The Physiology of the Novel. By revealing a now-forgotten range of Victorian theories of the novel, a range based in a study of human physiology during the act of reading, Nicholas Dames demonstrates the ways in which the Victorians thought they read, and uncovers surprising responses to the question of what might have transpired in the minds and bodies of readers of Victorian fiction. His detailed studies of novel critics who were also interested in neurological science, combined with readings of novels by Thackeray, Eliot, Meredith, and Gissing, propose a vision of the Victorian novel reader as far from the quietly immersed being we now imagine— as a reader whose nervous system was addressed, attacked, and soothed by authors newly aware of the neural operations of their public. Rich in unexpected intersections— from the British response to Wagnerian opera to the birth of speed-reading in the late nineteenth century—The Physiology of the Novel challenges our assumptions about what novel reading once did, and still does, to the individual reader, and provides new answers to the question of how novels influenced a culture’s way of reading, responding, and feeling.
Frances Dolan’s Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy is described thus:
Marriage is often described as a melding of two people into one. But what—or who—must be lost, fragmented, or buried in that process? In Marriage and Violence, Frances E. Dolan reveals the contradiction that lies at the very heart of modern marriage. We have inherited from early modern England a model of marriage so flawed, she contends, that its logical consequence is conflict.
Dolan ranges from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan advice literature to late twentieth-century discussions about how to defend battered women who kill their abusers; from the inevitable Taming of the Shrew to William Byrd’s diary of life on his Virginia plantation and Noel Coward’s Private Lives. By contrasting depictions of marriage in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries, she shows that the early modern apprehension of marriage as an economy of scarcity continues to haunt the present in the form of a conceptual structure that can accommodate only one fully developed person. When two fractious persons assert their conflicting wills, resolution can be achieved only when one spouse absorbs, subordinates, or eliminates the other.
Do feel free to add your reviews / thoughts on these new books via the comments feature below!
