ABSTRACT

In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology.

While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

part |40 pages

Empathy and Reading

chapter |13 pages

Empathy Aesthetics

Experimenting Between Psychology and Poetry

chapter |12 pages

Feeling Your Pain

Exploring Empathy in Literature and Neuroscience

part |60 pages

Empathy, Form, and the Body

chapter |13 pages

Empathic Noise

chapter |19 pages

I Object

Autism, Empathy, and the Trope of Personification

chapter |14 pages

“Hearing the Speechless”

Empathy with Animals in Contemporary German Lyric Poetry

chapter |12 pages

Empathizing with the Experience of Cultural Change

Reflections on Contemporary Fiction on Work

part |67 pages

Difficult Empathy

chapter |14 pages

Empathy and the Unlikeable Character

On Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Thérèse Raquin

chapter |15 pages

“The Great Sum of Universal Anguish”

Statistical Empathy in Victorian Social-Problem Literature

chapter |12 pages

Conformist Culture and the Failures of Empathy

Reading James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith

chapter |13 pages

“More Electrical Than Ethical”

Joan Didion and Empathy

chapter |11 pages

Humanizing the Inhumane

The Value of Difficult Empathy

part |51 pages

Empathy and Genre

chapter |13 pages

Empathy and Gender Activism in Early Modern Spain

María De Zayas's Amorous and Exemplary Novels

chapter |11 pages

Irony as Cognitive Empathy

Mind-Reading Tom Jones's Narrator

chapter |13 pages

Paradoxical Worsening of Empathy

Ambassadorial Science Journalism and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks