Rachel Ablow, ed.The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-472-05107-6. Price: US$29.95

A historical understanding of reading has, for some time now, been a kind of Holy Grail of literary studies. As our discipline has, over the past decades, shifted its focus away from the individual author or text as unit of analysis, and--even more recently--away from close reading and the hermeneutics of suspicion and other onion-peeling, lemon-squeezing methods of analysis, towards alternatives sometimes termed distant reading, just reading, or surface reading—the spotlight has focused on experience of the ordinary reader. Recent scholarship on reading differs from the reader-response criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, and from the phenomenological literary criticism of the 1960s (though several of the critics featured in the collection under review tip their hats to Georges Poulet) chiefly in two ways. The first is an emphasis on reading as above all an emotional, rather than cognitive or interpretive experience; and the second is a commitment to history. All of the critics collected in The Feeling of Reading demonstrate persuasively not only that beliefs about and experiences of reading are highly specific to their own historical moment, but also that among the rewards of probing another era’s conceptions of reading is a renewed critical purchase of those of our own era. This outstanding collection, edited by Rachel Ablow, seems designed to probe the intuition that the Victorian period was an especially formative moment in the history of modern private reading as we know it: reading as an absorbing experience conducted silently and alone, in intimate situations, in rooms, libraries, and landscapes, which makes us feel that we are indeed subjective beings. As a whole, the collection is dedicated to the idea that the history of reading is part of the history of emotions, and that the history of peoples’ relations to books is completely bound up (as it were) with the history of peoples’ relations to each other. For example, Nicholas Dames’s “On Not Close Reading” asks us to take seriously the Victorian book reviewer’s practice—which seems so lame and dorky to us—of making a review out of a string of extended excepts. What if we were to probe the literary theory—as a kind of enacting of the reading experience in all of its affective duration—behind such a practice, instead of writing it off? Leah Price’s delightful (and delightfully illustrated) essay, “Reader’s Block,” centers on Trollope but unfolds as a canny guide to “how to do things with books” in which reading and not-reading become allies rather than opposites. It is surely no accident that the two essays in Feeling Reading on poetry are remarkably effective in estranging and complicating our assumptions about what reading felt like in Victorian England. Catherine Robson’s “Reciting Alice” asks us to think about the ways in which, for most Victorians, the experience of reading a poem quickly morphed into memorizing and reciting it, while Herbert Tucker’s essay on “poetic fatigue” explores the ways in which reading could feel like work, like rest, and like the relation between the two. Each one of the essays in this volume benefits from being in the company of the others. Some tackle materials and questions that mark them as contributions to reading history, while others are really more traditional “readings”—interpretations of individual texts or authors, with an eye carefully trained on how those authors represent the act of reading, how they conceive of reading, or on how they demand to be read. But as with all superior edited collections, it is the provocative interplay among the essays that is most rewarding, and it is fascinating to see certain motifs repeated. The conjunction of reading and love runs …