Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels

“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