This is a truly important project of reading realism through somatic experience, including sensation, aesthetics, and physiology. Thrailkill offers bold interpretations of the relations between corporality and realism. Working at the intersections of modernity, genre, and history, Thrailkill challenges us to incorporate "physiological thinking" into our theories of affect and reading realism's effects on the body. An impressive response to the explosion of work on sentimental and sensational fictions.
   --Dale Bauer, Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Thrailkill opens up fresh ways of thinking about our whole aesthetic experience—meaning our whole body-and-mind experience—by combining contemporary theories of emotion with surprising readings of literature and philosophy from a century ago. The book excitingly reorients our understanding American literary realism, and it uses this literature to advance our current discussions of the place of affect in writing and reading.
   --Randall Knoper, author of Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance

ane F. Thrailkill is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.