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3 results

Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature
  • Stacey McDowell
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • 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.

  • Chapter 12 - Walter Pater, Charles Lamb, and ‘the value of reserve’

  • from Part II - Individual Authors: Early Moderns, Romantics, Contemporaries
  • Edited by Charles Martindale, University of Bristol, Elizabeth Prettejohn, University of York, Lene Østermark-Johansen, University of Copenhagen
  • Book:
    Walter Pater and the Beginnings of English Studies
    Published online:
    14 November 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023, pp 239-254

  • Summary

    Pater describes the writings of Charles Lamb as ‘an excellent illustration of the value of reserve in literature’. The remark is surprising because Lamb more often is celebrated for the warm familiarity of his essays rather than the withholding and coolness associated with reserve. It is Pater himself who was famed for his reserve, shy in company and elusive in his writing. But his essay on Lamb identifies a different quality of reserve and the different ways in which it can operate as an element of literary style. The humour of Lamb’s writing is a form of reserve that conceals the tragic facts of his life. Such concealment works through excess and deflection, masking the personal without seeming too remote or buttoned-up. What Pater values in Lamb provides insight into the peculiar reserve of his own writing, with its paradoxical mix of the personal and impersonal, and its style that is at once so elusive and so individually distinctive.