The Visceral Novel Reader: A Cultural History of Embodied Novel Reading in Britain, 1688-1927

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Readers can bring to bear on the novels they engage with all their sensory imaginings including their past perceptions in a way that brings the narrated events, figures and settings to life. Based on the phenomenological belief that our five senses constitute our lived body as we subjectively experience it (Merleau-Ponty 2012), the present project calls this kind of novel reading “embodied”. The study examines such embodied novel reading from the Restoration period until literary Modernism. It selects landmark novels in the history of British literature in order to theorize readers’ engagements with these novels in the specific social and historical circumstances of the initial time of publication. The corpus consists of ten novels, ranging from "Oroonoko" to "To the Lighthouse". The main objective is to unfold embodied novel reading at different historical stages since the turn to neuro-centrism in the late seventeenth until the early twentieth centuries. The hypothesis is that embodied reader response is part and parcel of the rise of the novel to unprecedented respectability in the era Victorian, and to verbal art in literary Modernism. The originality of this research project consists of developing a complex, context-sensitive reader model called the “visceral novel reader” that expands Paul Ricoeur’s triple mimesis of pre-, con- and re-figuration (1984) through the integration of performative theories and discourse analysis, as well as through a refined taxonomy of reading experiences. In order to approach embodied novel reading diachronically, which has not been studied yet, the project conducts a systematic analysis of the chosen text in several stages, namely the analysis of narrative structures, intermediality and paratext on the level of configuration as well as the investigation of their correlates on the level of prefiguration (lived body, media and sensory history, the body as a product of medical disciplinarization), and on the level of refiguration (the narrative, intermedial, and paratextual evocation of reading experiences). In doing so, the “visceral-novel-reader” model will flesh out the bloodless aesthetics of reception conceived by Iser and Jauß and will The Visceral Novel Reader: Der leibliche Akt des Romanlesens in der britischen Kulturgeschichte make a constructive intervention in the current debate about the practice of critique and the limits of demystification (Felski 2003, 2008, 2015). As such, the model promises to contribute significantly to the interdisciplinary investigation of readerly embodiment, emotion, and affect.