{"product_id":"feeling-for-the-poor-carolyn-betensky-9780813930619","title":"Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhat if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them--in and of itself--mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Beyond representations of conscious or unconscious wishes to control, conquer, or discipline the industrial poor, social-problem novels offered their middle-class readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middle-class fear of or sympathy for the working classes. They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middle-class desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and working-class characters, social-problem novels offered middle-class subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Carolyn Betensky\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0813930618\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780813930619\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Virginia Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 09\/24\/2010\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 240\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.10lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.90d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 05\/01\/2011\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eReference and Research Bk News\u003c\/i\u003e 04\/01\/2011 pg. 256","brand":"Carolyn Betensky","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":43926415999231,"sku":"9780813930619","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/products\/img_5d45b254-cd24-471d-bc0c-8880718cbe71.jpg?v=1681082964","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/feeling-for-the-poor-carolyn-betensky-9780813930619","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}