Coda: The Affective Pleasures of Reading and Not Reading

Summary

Throughout this book, I have discussed the ways in which sensational reading was sometimes seen as dangerous or unhealthy. But reading these novels was of course also pleasurable. It certainly has been for me. In this brief coda, I attend to the pleasurable affects associated with sensational reading, but also to the affects associated with not reading, or what Leah Price calls ‘nonreading’, by which I specifically refer to the pauses between serial reading or distracted reading. I have identified a trope in these novels of characters picking up a novel and attempting to read it, only to be distracted by the more compelling events occurring in their lives. This differs from the immersive reading that I discussed in Chapter 1, but it presents a similar theory of narrative affect.

First, to attend to the pleasures of sensational reading. While I discussed serialisation in the introduction, I have not explored seriality at length in the book, instead focusing on narration, char-acterisation and the language of affect and emotion in these novels. My own experience as a reader has, with few exceptions, been with novels rather than with the original serial publications of these texts. Yet the serial reading of sensation fiction clearly had, and has, specific pleasures and affects. While Oliphant complained of the speed associated with serial reading, the enforced pauses between instalments are an important aspect of the form and the affects it can generate. Breaks between instalments can allow readers to emotionally engage with and gossip about characters. In fall 2018, I taught a class on sensation fiction in which students read The Woman in White serially. Our interaction with the text over such a long period of time (months rather than the weeks that we gave to other texts) made the students even more invested in this narrative. We used the spaces between instalments to discuss what might happen next and share our predictions together, an activity that now tends to be reserved for television shows.