"Fiction has long had designs on its readers: making them, for example, feel complicit, long for a different plot, or cringe over characters' mistakes. These are symptoms, Anastasia Eccles argues, of a condition that she calls "perverse attachment," in which fiction inspires a strong desire in readers to act on something beyond their control. Eccles theorizes this form of frustrated agency as a constitutive aspect of the experience of reading fiction--especially as it was shaped by the tradition of sentimentalism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. It is also, significantly, a key feature of the mass politics that emerged at that time. Combining identification and disidentification, immersion and formal self-consciousness, these experiences challenge deep-seated binaries in our theories of reading and point toward a new account of the political stakes of literary form. Each chapter of Perverse Attachments focuses on a Romantic text or set of texts but opens onto larger questions by spotlighting a distinct narrative feature or theme: character, atmosphere, setting, plot, scene, regret, and embarrassment. Eccles shows how some of the novel's characteristic forms--from the character type of the witness-protagonist to the routine use of free indirect discourse--took shape through the pursuit of this form of readerly attachment. The result is a major work in the theory of the novel and the history of readerly experience"--
"This new theory of reader response describes "perverse attachment," or the powerful desire to intervene in a story, even when it is impossible to do so. Fiction has long inspired resistance in its readers: making them, for example, wish for a different plot, cringe at a moment of social discomfort, or want to warn a character about an approaching calamity. These are symptoms of a condition that Anastasia Eccles calls "perverse attachment," in which a person feels a strong desire to act on something beyond their control. Eccles theorizes this form of frustrated agency as a constitutive aspect of the experience of reading fiction, especially as it developed under the long influence of literary sentimentalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was also, significantly, a defining condition of the mass politics that emerged in the same period, which rested on the demands of new political subjects to participate in a process that excluded them.Perverse Attachments recovers a repertoire of aesthetic responses keyed to the psychodynamics of modern political life: complicity, suspense, historical regret, and cringing. Combining identification and disidentification, immersion and detachment, these experiences challenge deep-seated binaries in our theories of reading and point toward a new account of the political stakes of literary form. Through readings of works by Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and others Eccles shows how this distinctive aesthetic and political relation shaped the major genres of Romantic fiction and gave rise to some of the novel's characteristic forms, like the character type of the witness-protagonist and the techniques of free indirect discourse. The result is a major work in the theory of the novel and the history of readerly experience"--
