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This
book offers an original approach to a number of nineteenth-century
authors in terms of what are seen as the constitutive affective
dynamics of their work. Pursuing theoretically and philosophically
informed close readings, John Hughes emphasizes issues of the embodied
mind in literary texts, and explores the inventive and discriminating
powers of thought – as well as the projections of identity
and relatedness – staged and expressed by imaginative writing
in the ‘long nineteenth-century’. Within each chapter
a writer is seen as investigating the physical or emotional determinants
of mind, as well as the social conditions of subjectification, through
the figurative, dramatic and subjective means of their art.
… The individual author chapters examine a singular, exemplary,
instance of how acts of mind, and moments of self-awareness, are
generated from emotional or physical response: musical experience
in Blake; the recreational activity of walking in Wordsworth; fantasies
of resentment in Poe; moments or modes of cross-gender, feminine,
identification in Tennyson; bodily sensation, and self-separation,
in Charlotte Brontë; eye contact and looking in Hardy. In each
case, the exampled texts from these authors and poets display an
affective or physical inspiration. Hughes draws on themes of ethical
subjectivity in the work of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze to
provide essential reading for all those involved in nineteenth-century
literature.
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Prefatory Note
Introduction
1 ‘A Bard’s Prophetic
Song’: Blake and Music
2 ‘He Travels On’:
Wordsworth and the Walking Self
3 ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’:
Poe and Resentment
4 ‘All These Ladies’:
Tennyson and Femininity
5 ‘“I Love”,
“I Hate”, “I Suffer”’: Feeling,
Subjectivity, and Form in Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction
6 ‘What I See in Their
Faces’: Visual Inspiration in Hardy’s Fiction
Notes
Index |
“The issue of subjectivity
in literary writing is a topic of current debate, and John Hughes’s
elegant new study … formulates a genuine rethinking of the whole
topic of subjectivity in the text … Whilst of necessity stressing
the individuality of his individual authors – William Blake,
Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and
Hardy – Hughes also skillfully places them vis a vis the philosophical
and ideological context… [and] seeks to re-emphasise, in a philosophically
sophisticated series of readings the emotional qualities of
the text in its negotiation of the dialectical relation between
writer and reader… In sum, Affective Worlds is a highly
persuasive and genuinely original contribution to our re-reading
of these seminal texts [and] excitingly gives the reader a renewed
sense of the imbrication of the emotional self in the literary
text.” The Thomas Hardy Journal
“The originality, and great appeal, of John Hughes's
approach lies in his desire to foreground the role of emotions,
as both the impulse behind the work and the condition of the
reader's full engagement with it.... While providing enlightening
analyses of major works from the nineteenth-century John Hughes
remains true to his claim that we should... fully acknowledge
the affective dimension of reading.” Cercles: Revue
pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone
“John Hughes’ writing exemplifies
criticism that is at once intellectually rigorous but also humane.
His interrogation of theoretical perspectives and philosophical
concepts is persistently sophisticated while turned always to
the illumination of literary writing in its irreducible particularity,
to authorial individuality that is communicated and constituted
in style. Searching out the ways in which a wide range of authors
from Blake to Hardy understand subjectivity and ‘becoming an
individual’, Hughes writes luminously on, for instance, the
cryptic female subject positions of Tennyson; the bracing refusals
of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette to allow the reader’s sympathy
for an impoverished, hidden female subjectivity; and the haunting
place of remembered sights in Hardy. Enormously stimulating
in its reach and implication, ‘Affective Worlds’ is both brave
and delicate — a study to think about over and again.”
Francis O’Gorman, University of Leeds
“John Hughes writes with poignant, illuminating sensitivity
to emotion and sensation in texts, readers and writers. He brings
not only careful empathic attention, but also philosophical
learning and precise critical insight to these six richly nuanced
readings of major literary figures. Each writer emerges, unmistakable,
in the remarkable individuality of a style of feeling − which
is, as Hughes so convincingly shows, also a way of perceiving,
thinking and creating. The book maintains a fresh, open curiosity
about the affective experience of reading and responds deeply
and articulately to elements of literature that are inseparable
from the complex, many-coloured texture of our humanity.”
Sarah Wood, University of Kent “Affective
Worlds is an important and original study with far-reaching
implications, which starts from the premise that for decades,
literary studies has avoided the questions of affect and response
which are fundamental to the writing and reading of literature.
Building on this, Hughes unfolds an argument which is both
striking and subtle, drawing on the work of Deleuze and Cavell
to unravel the ways in which literature expresses, as Proust
put it, ‘that sensation of individuality for which we seek
in vain in our everyday existence’. Hughes identifies a particular
crisis in subjectivity in post-Romantic Western culture, and
accordingly, in a series of wonderfully exhilarating readings,
tracks the ways in which a range of nineteenth-century writers
work to stage subjectivity in its affective, corporeal and
cognitive dimensions. This complex, rewarding study could
not be more timely in its reminder of why we read –
and write about – literature.”
Clare Hanson, University of Southampton
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Publication Details
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Hardback ISBN: |
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978-1-84519-442-0 |
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Page Extent / Format: |
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256 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
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Release Date: |
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June 2011 |
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Illustrated: |
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No |
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Hardback Price: |
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£55.00 / $69.95 |
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