Perverse Attachments: Reading Fiction Around 1800 (Thinking Literature)

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 itch 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 an urge to act on something beyond their control. Eccles theorizes this form of frustrated agency as a constitutive part of the experience of reading fiction, especially under the influence of literary sentimentalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was also, significantly, a defining aspect 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.