Scenes of sympathy

"In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference constructed the middle-class self and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling paved the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics."--BOOK JACKET.