Modernist empathy : geography elegy and the uncanny Klappentext: This book shows how reading modernist literature gives us a fresh and necessary insight into both the tensions within the empathetic imagination and the idea of empathy itself. Writers such as Thomas Hardy Ford Madox Ford Mary Borden T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf encourage us to enter other perspectives even as they question the boundaries between self and other and hence the very possibility of empathy. Eve Sorum maintains that we must think through this complex literary heritage focusing on the geographic and elegiac modes of the empathetic imagination and revealing empathy as more fraught threatening and even uncanny than it first appears. Modernist Empathy thereby forges a theory of literary empathy as an act not of orientation but of disorientation thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of both modernist literature and the concept of literary empathy. Provides a new perspective on the works of Hardy Ford Barton Woolf and Eliot; Shows how a new form of empathy arose in a context of cultural social and political transformation with special attention given to World War I; Argues that modernist literary texts perform and examine empathy within abstraction