Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature

Through incisive analysis, Stacey McDowell shows how Romantic writers reflect on ideas about reading, revealing what the literary portrayal of shared reading adds to histories of the book and moral philosophy, and how the effects of form and style aim to reproduce the shared experience of reading described.

When two people read together, what do they stand to learn not just about the book, but about each other? Representations of people reading together in Romantic literature often describe the act of sharing a book as a kind of litmus test of sympathy. Frequently, however, fictional readers end up misreading the text, or each other, or both. Stacey McDowell shows how Romantic writers, in questioning the assumptions lying behind the metaphorical sense of reading as sympathy, reflect on ideas of reading – its private or social nature and its capacity to foster fellow feeling – while also suggesting something about the literary qualities intrinsic to sympathy itself – its hermeneutic, narrative, and rhetorical strategies. She reveals what the literary portrayal of shared reading adds to histories of the book and moral philosophy, and how the effects of form and style aim to reproduce the shared experience of reading described.