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.

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.