Empathic Space in Henry James's "The Jolly Corner"

Abstract

Abstract: This essay explores the spatial dynamics in James's short story "The Jolly Corner," arguing for the existence of a non-material or so-called empathic space generated by characters' physical and mental movements within the material and mental/imagined spaces of the storyworld. This cognitive literary analysis of "empathic spaces" in James's fiction draws on empathy's embodied and spatial nature rooted in the origins of empathy in German psychological aesthetics and experimental psychology of the early twentieth century. The essay highlights how Jamesian spaces function as experimental sites of intersubjective and empathic experience.