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. |
From inside the book
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Page xiv
... do to allow introspective accounts of reading (or teaching) canonical works of nineteenth-century fiction to substitute for broad inquiry into the effects of more popular, widely read fiction that succeeds with a female readership.
... do to allow introspective accounts of reading (or teaching) canonical works of nineteenth-century fiction to substitute for broad inquiry into the effects of more popular, widely read fiction that succeeds with a female readership.
Page xvi
... minorities, and younger people was especially disheartening: only 37.6 percent of males admitted to literary reading (balanced out by 55.1 percent of females); among Hispanics, only 26.5 percent were self-declared literary readers; ...
... minorities, and younger people was especially disheartening: only 37.6 percent of males admitted to literary reading (balanced out by 55.1 percent of females); among Hispanics, only 26.5 percent were self-declared literary readers; ...
Page xix
Hunt especially prizes the effect of novels on spreading the notion of women's subjectivity, but her conclusions take her beyond the renovation of opinion of mainly British and European middle-class readers about females and servants ...
Hunt especially prizes the effect of novels on spreading the notion of women's subjectivity, but her conclusions take her beyond the renovation of opinion of mainly British and European middle-class readers about females and servants ...
Page xx
... would be regarded as politically incorrect today, but it does seem a bit of a stretch to imagine that empathizing with Evelina counteracts all the moral consequences of howling with laughter at the humiliation of elderly females.
... would be regarded as politically incorrect today, but it does seem a bit of a stretch to imagine that empathizing with Evelina counteracts all the moral consequences of howling with laughter at the humiliation of elderly females.
Page xxiii
Chapter 4, “Empathy in the Marketplace,” begins with a cautious assessment of the claim that reading novels extends the empathetic circle. Do empathetic novels sell better in the world fiction market because they appeal to female ...
Chapter 4, “Empathy in the Marketplace,” begins with a cautious assessment of the claim that reading novels extends the empathetic circle. Do empathetic novels sell better in the world fiction market because they appeal to female ...
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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 |