Perverse Attachments

Reviews / Votes

"A vital contribution to the history and theory of reading, Perverse Attachments is also an outstanding study of the novel in British Romanticism. Eccles links the sentimental predicament of novel readers, moved to intervene in a scenario they cannot enter, with the state of the disenfranchised subject in a new age of mass political experience. Her at once subtle and compelling argument shows how a medley of experimental forms and genres-political and historical novels, terror tales, the novel of manners-composed a turning point in modern aesthetic and political sensibility." * Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley * "Perverse Attachments is a masterful piece of scholarship about the power of fiction. Eccles has written a book that promises to alter the way scholars of the novel understand pivotal innovations in fictional form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She works against the grain of conventional wisdom about narrative desire, subject formation, and the pleasures of literary form. In her hands, familiar but seemingly disparate features of literature suddenly coalesce, revealing a persistent concern: the 'predicament' of being profoundly implicated or attached even as we remain blocked or excluded from intervening." * Mary A. Favret, Johns Hopkins University * "Perverse Attachments makes an important contribution to the history of the novel. Even beyond that, it addresses larger questions about how we can understand the momentous transitions that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century in how power, privacy, and judgment are exercised. Eccles excels in moving between and beyond existing critical frames to offer original and absorbing accounts of the phenomenology of reading, and of the effects produced by particular narrative forms and devices." -- Yoon Sun Lee, Wellesley College