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Scenes of Sympathy
Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction
Audrey Jaffe
192 Pages
Paperback
ISBN: 9781501719899
Cornell University Press
In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.
Reviews
"Jaffe’s second book provides thorough and sophisticated readings. She draws her methodological apparatus from psychoanalytic and cinematic theory, which she handles with originality and flair. Scenes of Sympathy is a welcome addition to discussions of contemporary identity politics."
- Choice"Scenes of Sympathy is especially rich in its demonstration of the remarkable range of preoccupations, Victorian and current, which find their underpinning in sympathy."
- Andrew H. Miller, Victorian StudiesAbout the Author
This work can be downloaded for non-commercial purposes:

Scenes of Sympathy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.