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.