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.

• ContentsIntroduction PART I Theories of Narrative Empathy 1 A Theory of Narrative Empathy 2 from Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy3 from Empathic Inaccuracy in Narrative Fiction4 from Narrative and the Embodied Reader5 from Life Writing and the Empathetic CirclePART II Empathetic Readers 6 from Intersectional Narratology in the Study of Narrative Empathy7 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 Farm14 from Twenty-First Century Fictional Experiments with Emotion and Cognition 15 from Human Rights Discourse and Universals of Cognition and Emotion: Postcolonial FictionConclusion Works CitedIndex