1st Edition
Empathy and Reading Affect, Impact, and the Co-Creating Reader
This pioneering collection brings together Suzanne Keen’s extensive body of work on empathy and reading, charting the development of narrative empathy as an area of inquiry in its own right and extending cross-disciplinary conversations about empathy evoked by reading.
The volume offers a brief overview of the trajectory of research following the 2007 publication of Empathy and the Novel, with empathy understood as a suite of related phenomena as stimulated by representations in narratives. The book is organized around three thematic sections—theories; empathetic readers; and interdisciplinary applications—each preceded by a short framing essay. The volume features excerpts from the author’s seminal works on narrative empathy and makes available her harder-to-access contributions. The book brings different strands of the author’s research into conversation with existing debates, with the aim of inspiring future interdisciplinary research on narrative empathy.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in such fields as literary studies, cognitive science, emotion studies, affect studies, and applied contexts where empathetic practitioners work.
Contents
Introduction
PART I Theories of Narrative Empathy
1 A Theory of Narrative Empathy
2 from Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy
3 from Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction
4 from Narrative and the Embodied Reader
5 from Life Writing and the Empathetic Circle
PART II Empathetic Readers
6 from Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy
7 from Empathy in Reading: Considerations of Gender and Ethnicity
8 from Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character
9 from Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of our Nature
PART III Interdisciplinary Applications of Empathy, Affect, and Cognition
10 from Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions
11 from Empathy Studies
12 from Affect and Empathy Studies
13 from Affective Trollope: Marshaling the feelings in Orley Farm
14 from Twenty-First Century Fictional Experiments with Emotion and Cognition
15 from Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion: Postcolonial Fiction
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
Biography
Suzanne Keen serves as president of Scripps College, USA, where she is a member of the English Department. Her interdisciplinary work on narrative empathy draws on the novel, narrative theory, neuroscience, developmental and social psychology, and affective science.
