Empathy and the NovelDoes empathy felt while reading fiction actually cultivate a sense of connection, leading to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Drawing on psychology, narrative theory, neuroscience, literary history, philosophy, and recent scholarship in discourse processing, Keen brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, yet its role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. Keen surveys these debates and illustrates the techniques that invite empathetic response. She argues that the perception of fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy in part by releasing them from the guarded responses necessitated by the demands of real others. Narrative empathy is a strategy and subject of contemporary novelists from around the world, writers who tacitly endorse the potential universality of human emotions when they call upon their readers' empathy. If narrative empathy is to be taken seriously, Keen suggests, then women's reading and responses to popular fiction occupy a central position in literary inquiry, and cognitive literary studies should extend its range beyond canonical novels. In short, Keen's study extends the playing field for literature practitioners, causing it to resemble more closely that wide open landscape inhabited by readers. |
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Page ix
If immersion in culturally valued fictional worlds—canonical literature and serious fiction—predisposes readers to good ... to prose fiction.7 The cultural tendency to value novels and denigrate cartoons or video games, however, ...
If immersion in culturally valued fictional worlds—canonical literature and serious fiction—predisposes readers to good ... to prose fiction.7 The cultural tendency to value novels and denigrate cartoons or video games, however, ...
Page xvi
Rarely, but vitally for the continuity of cultural forms, novel readers sometimes become novelists. What dedicated reader would question the importance of novel reading if it produces the vocations of writers themselves?
Rarely, but vitally for the continuity of cultural forms, novel readers sometimes become novelists. What dedicated reader would question the importance of novel reading if it produces the vocations of writers themselves?
Page xvii
Cultural continuity, nuanced insights, informed debate, and independent judgment all suffer as reading declines (Reading at Risk vii). Though few of these assumptions have been subjected to systematic investigation, they strike a chord ...
Cultural continuity, nuanced insights, informed debate, and independent judgment all suffer as reading declines (Reading at Risk vii). Though few of these assumptions have been subjected to systematic investigation, they strike a chord ...
Page xviii
The rhetorical groundwork has been laid by a variety of cultural commentators who weigh in on the importance of reading. Three voices from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and history represent here the common argument that novel ...
The rhetorical groundwork has been laid by a variety of cultural commentators who weigh in on the importance of reading. Three voices from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and history represent here the common argument that novel ...
Page xxi
The fact that cultural authorities insist upon these connections just as reading becomes a minority pastime activates my skepticism as much as my concern, however. In the investigation that follows, I take a wide view of contemporary ...
The fact that cultural authorities insist upon these connections just as reading becomes a minority pastime activates my skepticism as much as my concern, however. In the investigation that follows, I take a wide view of contemporary ...
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Contents
1 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy | 3 |
2 The Literary Career of Empathy | 37 |
3 Readers Empathy | 65 |
4 Empathy in the Marketplace | 101 |
5 Authors Empathy | 121 |
6 Contesting Empathy | 145 |
A Collection of Hypotheses about Narrative Empathy | 169 |
Notes | 173 |
Works Cited | 209 |
Index | 235 |
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Common terms and phrases
activity aesthetic altruism Anil’s Ghost another’s argues authors Batson behavior believe Book Club brain Butler C. K. Stead chapter character identification character’s cognitive compassion contemporary cultivation cultural Daniel Batson discussion effects of reading Efuru emotional contagion emotional responses empa empathetic reading experiences empathetic response empathic inaccuracy emphasize ethical false empathy female Female Genital Cutting fictional characters fictional worlds fMRI gender genres Hakemulder Hoffman imagination individuals instance intentionally left blank J. K. Rowling Kuiken literary reading literature Martha Nussbaum Miall middlebrow mirror neurons Mistry’s Moral Development motives Nancy Eisenberg narration narrative empathy novel reading novelists Nussbaum Octavia Butler Ondaatje one’s Oprah personal distress popular postcolonial prosocial action psychologists reactions readers representation rescuers responses to fiction result role taking role-taking shared feeling social story suggests sympathy texts theorists theory tion tive understanding universal victims Victorian Wayne Booth Winfrey Winfrey’s women writing
Bibliographic information
| Title | Empathy and the Novel |
| Author | Suzanne Keen |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press, 2007 |
| ISBN | 0195343603, 9780195343601 |
| Length | 274 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |