Empathy and the NovelOxford University Press, 2007 M04 19 - 274 pages Does 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 xix
... women. We seem to be turning into a nicer species” (“Seed Salon” 48). Most gratifyingly for those of us who spend ... women's subjectivity, but her conclusions take her beyond the renovation of opinion of mainly British and European ...
... women. We seem to be turning into a nicer species” (“Seed Salon” 48). Most gratifyingly for those of us who spend ... women's subjectivity, but her conclusions take her beyond the renovation of opinion of mainly British and European ...
Page xx
... women are recruited from local villages to run in a footrace, and one in which the heroine's vulgar old grandmother ... woman in her thirties carrying a child about eighteen months old. I suddenly felt the weight of that toddler in my ...
... women are recruited from local villages to run in a footrace, and one in which the heroine's vulgar old grandmother ... woman in her thirties carrying a child about eighteen months old. I suddenly felt the weight of that toddler in my ...
Page xxi
... women like me among the victims short-circuited my empathy. I couldn't identify with them; they were too unlike me; their circumstances and their suffering were unimaginable. This despite the fact that I had read dozens of novels set in ...
... women like me among the victims short-circuited my empathy. I couldn't identify with them; they were too unlike me; their circumstances and their suffering were unimaginable. This despite the fact that I had read dozens of novels set in ...
Page xxiii
... women experience extension of their empathy because they read novels? Beginning with these questions, I discuss gender as a constitutive feature of the middlebrow reader, and I consider the central role of affect in the construction of ...
... women experience extension of their empathy because they read novels? Beginning with these questions, I discuss gender as a constitutive feature of the middlebrow reader, and I consider the central role of affect in the construction of ...
Page xxiv
... women, racial and ethnic minorities, and postcolonial citizens) reaches a wide readership. In celebrated cases this fiction transcends barriers of difference represented by race, nation, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, among ...
... women, racial and ethnic minorities, and postcolonial citizens) reaches a wide readership. In celebrated cases this fiction transcends barriers of difference represented by race, nation, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, among ...
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