Empathy and Reading

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.

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