Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America
"Gillian Silverman's lively study of reading practices in the nineteenth-century United States provides excellent analyses of books and readers alike. By looking at how readers could experience 'communion' as both an absorption in one another and a way to absorb books, Silverman provides a fascinating new understanding of what it means to read. Examining both familiar authors such as Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau and newly reinterpreted authors like Mary Austin and Susan B. Warner, Silverman offers a fresh way to understand the forms of intimacy their works provide."—Shirley Samuels, Cornell University"This is a wonderful book, clearly written, well researched, and insightful. Silverman shows that reading was conceived as an embodied activity that created an intimate and potentially erotic communion with someone other than the self (the author, other readers, the dead, etc.)."—Marianne Noble, American University"Original and fascinating. Sure to be influential in the fields of American literature, American studies, and the history of the book. To understand nineteenth-century readers' experience of harmonious union through reading is to alert us to the limits of contemporary theories that represent reading as an experience characterized by opposition, resistance, and hierarchy."—Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary