Imagining Otherwise

"From fan fiction to "relatability"--the assessment of novels based on how easy it is to imagine the represented experiences--the individual reader's imagination has become a determining part of the contemporary literary environment. Literary studies has a long history of critical approaches, from New Criticism to surface reading, devoted to minimizing the associations and inventiveness that readers bring to a text. Imagining Otherwise instead seeks to explain how we came to view fiction as available for imaginative appropriation in the first place. Gettelman argues for the Victorian roots of the core modernist belief that readers complete an author's vision. As novel readership expanded in the nineteenth century, many Victorian writers became frustrated with readers' formulaic expectations and sought to engage aesthetically with their readers' imaginations. Gettelman argues that the elevation of the novel as a genre began when writers started to incorporate, rather than exclude, the common reader's daydreams and emotions into their work. Taking a fresh look at works by Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, and Trollope, as well as some of their modernist successors (Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and others), Gettelman traces narrative techniques, including direct address, verb tense, syntax, and prose style, that reflect Victorian authors' changing perceptions of and engagement with their readers"--