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9781421406534 Academic Inspection Copy

Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

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Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them. By abstracting emotions, feelings turn into detached figures of speech that may be shared. Sympathy in this way produces realism; it is the imaginative process through which the real is substantiated.In Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction Greiner shows how this imaginative process of sympathy is written into three novelistic techniques regularly associated with nineteenth-century fiction: metonymy, free indirect discourse, and realist characterization. She explores the work of sentimentalist philosophers David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham and realist novelists Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathetic Realism
1. Going Along with Others: Adam Smith and the Realists
Part 1: Smith's Sympathetic Protocols
Part 2: Sympathetic Form
2. The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness: Bentham, Austen, and th eRealist Case
Part 1: Sympathy and the Case for Realism
Part 2: Persuasion and the Sympathetic Case
3. Dickensian Sympathy: Translation in Proper Pitch
Part 1: Harmonizign in Other Words
Part 2: Form's Proper Pitch
4. Not Getting to Know You: Sympathetic Detachment
Part 1: Sympathetic Detachment
Part 2: Groupthink in Conrad and James
Coda: Sympathy versus Empathy: The Ends of Sympathy at Century's End
Notes
Bibliography
Index

""In this invigorating book, Rae Greiner takes a familiar topic ' the workings of sympathy in nineteenth-century fiction ' and shows us how to think about it in new and highly productive ways... Building on a solid foundation provided by prior critics, Greiner makes a persuasive case for thinking anew about sympathy: what it is, how it works, and why it proved so vital to the development of novelistic realism.""

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