Empathy and the novel
By: Suzanne Keen.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
ISBN-13: 9780195175769
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.