The Location of Experience: Victorian Women Writers, the Novel, and the Feeling of Living

WINNER, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL PRIZE, MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION

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 categor...