Fear of fiction: The novel |
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| Authors: | Steven Starker |
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| Institution: | (1) Veteran’s Administration Medical Center, 97210 Portland, OR |
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| Abstract: | When realistic prose fiction appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century, it aroused the fears of the privileged and
pious who believed that vivid details and heightened emotional scenes would corrupt readers. Fantasy and even madness would
replace rationality and conscience. Young people and women were viewed as particularly vulnerable. Such fiction flourished
nevertheless, both in England and in the United States.
... it may, with confidence, be pronounced, that no one was ever an extensive and habitual reader of novels, even supposing
them all to be well selected, without suffering both intellectual and moral injury and of course incurring a diminution of
happiness. —Reverend Samuel Miller, 1803
Steven Starker is chief, psychology service, Portland Veteran’s Administration Medical Center, and professor of medical psychology
at Oregon Health Sciences University. This article is excepted from Chapter 4 of hisEvil Influences: Crusades Against the Mass Media (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1989). |
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