The Location of Experience

"The relationship between experience and realism, what it means and what it feels like to read fiction: in Adela Pinch's hands, these longstanding questions come to seem newly strange and newly fascinating. Part of her genius lies in considering how formal problems intersect not just with the experience of reading, but with what we read for: how we think about care, human vulnerability, and our existence in and through others. The Location of Experience will be required--and deeply pleasurable--reading for all who are interested in the novel, the Victorian period, or what 'counts' as experience in the first place."--Rachel Ablow, University at Buffalo, SUNY

"This impressive and beautifully written book models a new way of understanding Victorian realism and the enduring compacts it makes with generations of devoted readers. Pinch unfolds a set of arguments linked by a carefully historicized conception of experience: its putative presence or absence as a precondition for imaginative writing; the way family feeling reverberates through narrative choice; the two-way tug of desire and prohibition in the plotting of character trajectories."--Vanessa Smith, University of Sydney

We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside?

The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era's great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience--and experiences themselves--among each other.

Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction's formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.

Adela Pinch is Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

Adela Pinch is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (1996), and Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (2010).