LEADER 04717nam 2200757 a 450 001 9910788384303321 005 20211014010453.0 010 $a1-283-89880-2 010 $a0-8122-0618-5 024 7 $a10.9783/9780812206180 035 $a(CKB)3170000000046379 035 $a(OCoLC)847551175 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebrary10642726 035 $a(SSID)ssj0000713493 035 $a(PQKBManifestationID)11416395 035 $a(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000713493 035 $a(PQKBWorkID)10658136 035 $a(PQKB)10106251 035 $a(OCoLC)821725625 035 $a(MdBmJHUP)muse17541 035 $a(DE-B1597)449557 035 $a(OCoLC)979748808 035 $a(DE-B1597)9780812206180 035 $a(Au-PeEL)EBL3441974 035 $a(CaPaEBR)ebr10642726 035 $a(CaONFJC)MIL421130 035 $a(MiAaPQ)EBC3441974 035 $a(EXLCZ)993170000000046379 100 $a20111110d2012 uy 0 101 0 $aeng 135 $aurcn||||||||| 181 $ctxt 182 $cc 183 $acr 200 10$aBodies and books$b[electronic resource] $ereading and the fantasy of communion in nineteenth-century America /$fGillian Silverman 205 $a1st ed. 210 $aPhiladelphia $cUniversity of Pennsylvania Press$dc2012 215 $a1 online resource (241 p.) 300 $aBibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph 311 0 $a0-8122-4415-X 320 $aIncludes bibliographical references and index. 327 $tFront matter --$tContents --$tPreface. Reading and the Search for Oneness --$tIntroduction. The Fantasy of Communion --$tChapter 1. Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading --$tChapter 2. Books and the Dead --$tChapter 3. Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville's Pierre --$tChapter 4. Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative --$tChapter 5. "The Polishing Attrition": Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner --$tEpilogue. No End in Sight --$tNotes --$tBibliography --$tIndex --$tAcknowledgments 330 $aIn 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. 606 $aAmerican literature$y19th century$xHistory and criticism 606 $aIntimacy (Psychology) in literature 606 $aInterpersonal relations in literature 606 $aBooks and reading$xPsychological aspects 606 $aBooks and reading$zUnited States$xHistory$y19th century 606 $aAuthors and readers$zUnited States$xHistory$y19th century 610 $aCultural Studies. 610 $aLiterature. 615 0$aAmerican literature$xHistory and criticism. 615 0$aIntimacy (Psychology) in literature. 615 0$aInterpersonal relations in literature. 615 0$aBooks and reading$xPsychological aspects. 615 0$aBooks and reading$xHistory 615 0$aAuthors and readers$xHistory 676 $a810.9/353 700 $aSilverman$b Gillian D.$f1967-$01567832 801 0$bMiAaPQ 801 1$bMiAaPQ 801 2$bMiAaPQ 906 $aBOOK 912 $a9910788384303321 996 $aBodies and books$93839555 997 $aUNINA