Empathy and the Novel
"Empathy and the Novelbelongs in the company of Peter Brooks'Reading for the Plotas an exciting and lucid reflection on empathy in the novel and on the empathetic effects of narrative on readers. Working at the cross-section of literature, neuroscience, and psychology, the book is a stunningly original, broad-ranging contribution to narrative ethics and to the meanings of emotion in literature, life, and human society." --Susan Stanford Friedman, Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison"Drawing on cognitive science, narrative theory, and the sociology of reading,Empathy and the Novelchallenges the received wisdom about the ethical effects of novel-reading.  That identification leads to empathy and empathy to altruism has been one of the axioms of novel criticism, repeated in different terms from the eighteenth century to the present.  Keen replaces those easy pieties by a subtler account of emotional response which nonetheless accounts for the centrality of empathy to ordinary readers' accounts of their own experience." --Leah Price, author ofThe Anthology and the Riseof the Novel"Empathy and the Novel. . . helps us read more distinctly the written record of the nineteenth-century novelists and critics who put overwhelming faith in the sympathetic work of the novel as a form." --Victorian Studies"Suzanne Keen calls into question the widespread assumption that imaginative engagement with fictional works can help us become more empathetic and more ethical persons. Lively, incisive, sobering, and deeply instructive,Empathy and the Novelwill prove of great interest to those working on narrative, on the psychology of reading, on ethics and literature, and on popular fiction, while making a key contribution to the new field of cognitive literary studies." --Alan Richardson, Professor of English, Boston College