The Reader, the Body, and the Book

How do books dazzle, disgust, or delight audiences? What entices readers to track characters’ trials and tribulations? Why do stories echo across the ages with their intensity? Books with vibrant, somatic elements prompt us to identify with protagonists who fall in love, flee from pursuers, and fight for survival, enhancing the awareness of our own bodies. This transatlantic, diachronic study of 19th-century literature analyzes the rising complexity of sensorimotor descriptions in four major Victorian novels: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Based on phenomenological insights of French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricœur, this groundbreaking research on visceral reading experiences in British and U.S. American fiction illuminates the immersive appeal of bodily motions and sensations in books, film adaptions, and digital resources of the 21st century.

About the Author

Natasha Anderson earned her doctoral degree in British Studies with a grade of “summa cum laude”, part of a German Research Foundation project, and her M.A. in American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, where she now studies Digital Humanities. She participated in the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University, published articles in English Studies and Journal of European Periodical Studies, and wrote book reviews in European Journal of American Studies.