Unformed Feelings: Reading Affects in the Mid-Victorian NovelSimundich, Joel PetercreatorRooney, EllenAdvisorAnderson, AmandaReaderBewes, TimothyReaderBrown University. Department of Englishsponsor2017, None p.born digitalThesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2017thesesThis dissertation argues that depletive affective experiences engendered by reading are crucial for understanding the formal innovations of the Mid-Victorian novel. Unlike their 18th-century predecessors, 19th-century novelists like Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Anne Brontë, and George Eliot aimed precisely at engendering diminished affective responses and did so through what came to look like peculiar formal failings: unmotivated characters, inattentive narrators, enervated plots, and needlessly protracted narratives. For these authors, low-intensity affective states like frustration, enervation, tedium and confusion proved critical for capturing the attenuation of life at the onset of modernity—and, significantly, for engendering means of resistance. Investigating the formal and affective developments that the novel underwent from the 1840s through the 1880s, this project also engages with recent critical debates on the value of reading and the forms of embodiment represented in Victorian literature. By demonstrating how novel reading attunes readers to the structure of less intelligible states of affective susceptibility, Mid-Victorian novelists sought to represent less immediate structures of feeling as well as reflect on the yields of novel reading itself, showing in turn that attentive, critical modes of reading can be counterintuitively practiced not despite but because of the impoverishment of our affective responses. victorian literatureEnglish literatureAffect theoryEnglishRPB2017061610.7301/Z0PR7TF8In CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations