Empathy and the novel
"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, but 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 their guarded responses necessitated by the demands of real others."--Jacket
xxix, 242 pages ; 25 cm
9780195175769, 019517576X
70407721
Contemporary perspectives on empathy
The literary career of empathy
Readers' empathy
Empathy in the marketplace
Authors' empathy
Contesting empathy
Appendix : a collection of hypotheses about narrative empathy