Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature-nurbook

Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature book cover

Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature

Author(s): Stacey McDowell (Author)

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: February 19, 2026
Language: English
Print length: 250 pages
ISBN-10: 1009380427
ISBN-13: 9781009380423

Book Description

When two people read together, what do they stand to learn not just about the book, but about each other? Representations of people reading together in Romantic literature often describe the act of sharing a book as a kind of litmus test of sympathy. Frequently, however, fictional readers end up misreading the text, or each other, or both. Stacey McDowell shows how Romantic writers, in questioning the assumptions lying behind the metaphorical sense of reading as sympathy, reflect on ideas of reading – its private or social nature and its capacity to foster fellow feeling – while also suggesting something about the literary qualities intrinsic to sympathy itself – its hermeneutic, narrative, and rhetorical strategies. She reveals what the literary portrayal of shared reading adds to histories of the book and moral philosophy, and how the effects of form and style aim to reproduce the shared experience of reading described.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

An incisive exploration of how Romantics understood shared reading, providing new insight for histories of the book and moral philosophy.

About the Author

Stacey McDowell is an Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University.

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