Back Stories: Human Embodiment and the Novel

Abstract

Back Stories: Human Embodiment and the Novel argues that our most familiar narrative structures are integrally linked to the unique phenomenological attributes of the human back surface – a side of the body that, asymmetrical to the front, can neither see nor be seen by its possessor. The argument advances through detailed analyses of novels that render especially obvious the relation between the human back and novelistic forms. In these works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, numerous narrative shapes are mapped onto the front-back asymmetry of characters’ imagined bodies. And such mappings, particularly varied and salient in these novels but present throughout literature, indicate a deep cognitive association between narrative form and embodied perception as shaped by the human body’s dorsoventral morphology.