Category: Literature Panics

• The "Novel" Addiction

  This theory held that habitual reading of romance and other novels could overstimulate the emotions, weaken judgment, and make women socially or domestically unmanageable. It emerged from a long moral panic over novel reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when expanding print culture gave many more women access to fiction. Critics repeatedly described novels as addictive, morally corrupting, physically weakening, and mentally disorganizing, while satirical and didactic works dramatized the figure of the female reader led astray by imagination.