One of the first features of the eighteenth-century novel to strike the modern reader is its sheer length, and yet critics have argued that these novels prioritize emotional experiences that are essentially fleeting. “Novel Feelings” corrects this imbalance by attending to ongoing emotional experiences like suspense, familiarization, frustration, and hope—both as they are represented in novels and as they characterize readerly response to novels. In so doing, I demonstrate the centrality of such protracted emotional experiences to debates about the ethics of feeling in eighteenth-century Britain. Scholarship on the sentimental novel and the literature of sensibility tends to locates the ethical work of novel feeling in short, self-contained depictions of a character’s sympathetic response to another’s suffering. Such readings often rely on texts like Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling or Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, short works composed out of even shorter, often disjointed scenes in which the focal characters encounter and respond emotionally to the distresses of others. And yet, these fragmentary productions which deliberately deemphasize narrative connection between scenes do not provide ideal models for approaching the complex large-scale plotting of many eighteenth-century novels. Through my attention to larger-scale formal techniques for provoking and sustaining feeling throughout the duration of reading a lengthy novel, I demonstrate how writers from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen taught readers to linger with feelings, particularly ones that might initially produce pain or discomfort. By challenging readers to remain within a feeling that refuses to be over, these novels demand a vision of ethical action that would be similarly lasting—moving beyond the comfortable closure of a judgment passed or a sympathetic tear shed to imagine a continuous, open-ended attention to others.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a whole language reading strategy using two different types of texts, regular text and language experience text in teaching adults to read. The participants were four prison inmates between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-eight. Data were collected during an eight-week period, which included thirty-two private sessions with each participant. These private sessions were composed of lessons using whole-language texts in which participants read aloud both regular (published) and language-experience texts in a single-subject Alternating Treatments Design. The dependent measures were sight words learned, miscues, and achievement in word recognition and comprehension. The results indicated that, under the treatments, each participant achieved modest gains in general word recognition and comprehension. Sight word acquisition occurred under the treatment conditions, and miscue patterns were influenced by the type of materials used. Additionally, each participant reflected a growth in a positive attitude towards reading. / Ed. D.

While there exists substantial research on struggling and developmental readers, few research-practitioners have sought to examine the histories and circumstances that result in strong readers. This study drew upon the reading autobiographies of doctoral students in an English Education program at an Ivy League institution, in order to discover what can be learned from first-hand narrative accounts of their reading lives about the early literacy experiences, reading practices, family, community, school and cultural influences of a group of “strong” adult readers. Also examined for comparative and contrasting data are the reading lives of remedial and honors first-year college composition students at a 2-year community college. An understanding of how the environments, people, institutions, circumstances, and texts encountered in the literacy lives of the three different groups studied here can assist literacy educators in bridging theory with practice for the teaching of reading in early grades and for the teaching of college-level reading in first-year college writing classes. A central term and concept to help explain the trajectory of the reading lives of the populations studied here was Deborah Brandt’s (1998) theory of “sponsors of literacy.” Brandt’s terminology and the notion of sponsorship along with a sociocultural theoretical framework are used to interpret the reading autobiographies in this study. Methods employed were based on Connelly and Clandinin’s narrative inquiry approach, a methodology steeped in the richness of the storied lives of the participants. The three patterns that emerged in the strong readers’ memories were: (a) being read to in the home prior to school age; (b) dichotomous attitudes toward in-school and out-of-school reading, especially around the middle school years; and (c) evidence of firm productive habits of mind toward complex reading that extends into the higher education years. The early literacy sponsorship and productive habits of mind were less evidenced in the remedial population. The findings of certain common characteristics and practices in the backgrounds of strong readers, many of which were not present at the same level in the remedial readers, can help literacy educators and caregivers re-examine their role as literacy sponsors and offer approaches for how we might sponsor literacy differently to create strong readers at any stage of their education.