Empathy and Reading

<p>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. </p><p>The volume offers a brief overview of the trajectory of research following the 2007 publication of <em>Empathy and the Novel</em>, 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. </p><p>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.</p> <p>Contents</p><p>Introduction </p><p><strong>PART I Theories of Narrative Empathy </strong></p><p>1 A Theory of Narrative Empathy </p><p>2 <em>from</em> Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy</p><p>3 <em>from</em> Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction</p><p>4 <i>from</i> Narrative and the Embodied Reader</p><p>5 <i>from</i> Life Writing and the Empathetic Circle</p><p>PART II Empathetic Readers </p><p>6 <em>from</em> Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy</p><p>7 <i>from</i> Empathy in Reading: Considerations of Gender and Ethnicity </p><p>8 <i>from</i> Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character </p><p>9 <i>from</i> Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of our Nature<i> </i></p><p>PART III Interdisciplinary Applications of Empathy, Affect, and Cognition </p><p>10 <em>from</em> Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions </p><p>11 <i>from</i> Empathy Studies </p><p>12 <i>from</i> Affect and Empathy Studies </p><p>13 <i>from</i> Affective Trollope: Marshaling the feelings in <em>Orley Farm</em></p><p>14 <i>from</i> Twenty-First Century Fictional Experiments with Emotion and Cognition </p><p>15 <i>from</i> Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion: Postcolonial Fiction</p><p>Conclusion </p><p>Works Cited</p><p>Index</p>