WINNER, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL PRIZE, MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?
The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the eras great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experienceand experiences themselvesamong each other.
Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fictions formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.
The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.