Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels by Gettelman, Debra

Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780691260419)

Vendor: Debra Gettelman
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$99.95
$99.95
$99.95
Subtotal: $99.95
Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels by Gettelman, Debra

Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels

$99.95
Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels by Gettelman, Debra

Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels

$99.95
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
x

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heights

As novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience--sometimes grudgingly--that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page.

Debra Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader's independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction. Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader's capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination.

As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader's imagination has become a determining element of today's literary environment. Imagining Otherwise takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.

Author: Debra Gettelman
ISBN-10: 0691260419
ISBN-13: 9780691260419
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/13/2024
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.21lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.69d
By Debra Gettelman
By Debra Gettelman
x
Debra Gettelman is associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross.

Recently Viewed Products