Introduction: Reading Minds

An opening example in which the attempt to share a book backfires reveals the meanings attached to that activity. Scenes of shared reading reflect on both the nature of reading and the nature of sharing. In the Romantic period, shifts in solitary and social reading habits had produced new ideas about how far reading was a private or shared experience. Questions about the nature of sharing, and how another person’s thoughts and feelings could be known, had also been raised by eighteenth-century theories of fellow feeling and sympathy. The peculiar intimacy involved in sharing a book affords special insight into these debates. Moreover, the embedded representation of reading – the odd self-reflexiveness produced by writers writing about reading – means that these scenes comment on literature’s unique capacity to enable shared ways of thinking and feeling. These scenes also uncover a literary quality intrinsic to sympathy itself.