As novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience—sometimes grudgingly—that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page.
Debra Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader’s independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction. Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader’s capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination.
As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader’s imagination has become a determining element of today’s literary environment. Imagining Otherwise takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.
Debra Gettelman is associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross.
"An inherently fascinating and thought-provoking read. . . . [and] a seminal work of ground-breaking scholarship."—Midwest Book Review
“Imagining Otherwise offers a welcome and brilliant corrective to the reductive modernist notion that Victorian novelists dictated moral responses for readers or rejected the innate variability of readerly subjectivity. Gettelman’s astute and nuanced readings show George Eliot and her peers creating space for readers ‘whose imagination is independent of the author’s control’—readers who respond to novels by ‘daydreaming, identifying, conjecturing, and making comparisons with real life.’”—John Plotz, author of Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens
“Showing how nineteenth-century novelists viewed readers as cocreators, and uncovering a series of directives, invitations, responses, and complaints that have long been hiding in plain sight, Debra Gettelman transforms our understanding of reader-author relations. A beautifully written, invaluable contribution.”—Audrey Jaffe, author of The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology
“Through a series of patiently brilliant close readings, Gettelman shows how writers’ anxieties about being misread become active parts of their fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise alters the landscape of discussion about that elusive but increasingly compelling subject, the mind of the Victorian reader.”—Rosemarie Bodenheimer, author of Knowing Dickens
“Gettelman shows how novels at the very center of teaching and scholarship about nineteenth-century England were far more open to readers’ imaginative collaborations than we have typically thought them to be. Imagining Otherwise is an excellent work of critical analysis that is sure to stimulate considerable discussion.”—James Buzard, author of Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels