How did the Victorians read novels? The author answers that deceptively simple question by revealing a now-forgotten range of nineteenth-century theories of the novel, a range based in a study of ...human physiology during the act of reading. He 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 instead 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, this book 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.
Spanning the time from the 1st century BCE to the 400s CE, this volume highlights the multifaceted interactions between Greco-Roman historiographical texts and their readers. Its contributions focus ...on the testimonies offered by ancient readers themselves and they engage in close readings of the historiographical works to explore how these texts involve their audiences and stimulate a fascinating range of intellectual and affective reactions.
Diese literaturgeschichtliche Arbeit führt erstmals auf breiter Quellenbasis den empirischen Nachweis, dass Leser/-innen beim auerwissenschaftlichen Umgang mit Literatur in Geschichte und Gegenwart ...Applikationen vornehmen. Es wird gezeigt, welche Formen eine solche Applikation annehmen kann, und dass es sich um eine relevante Praktik handelt. Unter ‚Applikation' ist eine Tätigkeit im Rahmen des Rezeptionsprozesses zu verstehen, bei welcher Leser/-innen das Gelesene auf ihre persönlichen oder lebensweltlichen Erfahrungen, Überzeugungen und Einstellungen beziehen. Das Ergebnis dieser Bezugnahme, welches ebenfalls ‚Applikation' heit, kann sein, dass sie neue Überzeugungen und Einstellungen bilden, bestehende verändern oder verwerfen. Um Existenz, Beschaffenheit und Relevanz des Phänomens zu belegen, wurde eine Fülle an Rezeptionsdokumenten ausgewertet. Sie geben Auskunft über die Erstrezeption von neun Romanen aus vier Jahrhunderten, die das literarische Korpus der Arbeit bilden, darunter Goethes Werther, Manns Buddenbrooks und Schlinks Der Vorleser. Die Arbeit beleuchtet eine wichtige, in der bisherigen rezeptionsgeschichtlichen Forschung nicht hinreichend beachtete Praktik des auerwissenschaftlichen Umgangs mit Literatur.
Modern historical criticism came to South Africa in the third decade of the twentieth century. However, analysing biblical books like human documents was not acceptable to church authorities. The ...historical-critical study of the Bible thus suffered a blow. It took four decades before some reformed biblical scholars felt at ease to reintroduce historical criticism. However, during the seventh decade of the twentieth century, overseas biblical scholars were already experimenting with the research tools of modern literary studies. Some South African biblical scholars followed suit, and soon narrative criticism and reader-response criticism were part of the package of methods for reading and studying the Bible. Gerrie Snyman was one of them, and reader-response criticism assisted him in reflecting on how he as a white Afrikaans speaking male, can continue doing biblical research in the post-apartheid era. He developed a hermeneutic of vulnerability and argued that readers should take responsibility for their readings of biblical texts. https://doi.org/10.17159/2312-3621/2023/v36n1a3
How do readers experience literary narrative? Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind, this book offers a principled account of the dynamics underlying readers' ...responses to narrative. Through its interdisciplinary approach,this study combines close readings of literary texts and theoretical discussion in ways that shed light on the deep connection between narrative, literary fiction, and human experience.
The aim of this article is to analyse Constantine P. Cavafy’s poems on death with the help of theoretical and hermeneutical literary principles and the interplay of the Greek words sema (“a grave”) ...and soma (“the body”). The aim is to study their forms and symbolisms as one of the fundamental motifs of Cavafy’s oeuvre. Simultaneously, the article will compare the poetic symbols with ancient philosophy on death (exemplified by Plato), as well as with the later authors’ (for instance, Stephane Mallarme’s) symbolistic considerations of death, which inspired Cavafy’s, modern, poetry. Through a textual analysis of his poetry on death, the poet’s influence and the sense of destruction he arouses in the reader will be explored. Furthermore, the article will focus on the thymotic power of his poetry, arguing that this author of historical heritage—that is, of the inheritance of Eros inheritance—is also an author of the inheritance of Thanatos.
The aim of the paper is to present several fairy tales from Giuseppe Pitrè’s collection as a potentially interesting reading material for children. Since classical fairy tales in some cases depict ...traditional gender roles, they can present an obstacle to children’s gender construction. Therefore, it is also important to read those stories which do not have a stereotypical gender discourse. We found such stories in Pitrè’s collection of folk fairy tales from the 19th century. In the paper we present the analysis of the structure of several folk fairy tales from Pitrè’s collection. The analysis has been performed according to Propp’s structuralist method, while the task was to determine the morphology of those fairy tales dealing with female hero-seekers. Such heroines correspond to the feminist perspective and they are convenient for reading in education for the purpose of children’s constructions of gender not exclusively provided by normative canons. The model of critical reading, which we suggest for reading the analyzed fairy tales, has been founded on reader-response criticism.
This article introduces the special issue. In it, we argue that research into reader response should be recognised as a vital aspect of contemporary stylistics, and we establish our focus on work ...which explicitly investigates such responses through the collection and analysis of extra-textual datasets. Reader response research in stylistics is characterised by a commitment to rigorous and evidence-based approaches to the study of readers’ interactions with and around texts, and the application of such datasets in the service of stylistic concerns, to contribute to stylistic textual analysis and/or wider discussion of stylistic theory and methods. We trace the influence of reader response criticism and reception theory on stylistics and discuss the productive dialogues which exist between stylistics and the related fields of the empirical study of literature and naturalistic study of reading. After offering an overview of methods available to reader response researchers and a contextualising survey of existing work, we argue that both experimental and naturalistic methods should be regarded as ‘empirical’, and that stylistics is uniquely positioned to embrace diverse approaches to readers and reading. We summarise contributions to the special issue and the valuable insights they offer into the historical context of reader response research and the way readers perceive and evaluate texts (either poetry or narrative prose). Stylistic reader response research enables both the testing and development of stylistic methods, in accordance with the progressive spirit of the discipline, and also the establishment of new and renewed connections between stylistic research and work in other fields.
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