Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Key figures in Smith’s definition of sympathy clarify the ways his definition is unique and representative in Enlightenment discourse and suggest significant correlations with narrative perspective. His figures of the brother on the rack and the impartial spectator make kinship, physical pain, visual perception, and abstract perspective central to his influential account of sympathy. In the effort to overcome human difference, his conception of perspective anticipates a novelistic version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate difference through shifting narrative perspectives. “Vicarious narratives” identifies intersections between second-hand emotions, or feeling another person’s emotions as if they were one’s own, and second-hand narratives, or telling another person’s story as if it were one’s own. Details of grammar and citation posit a grammar of vicarious experience that destabilizes the meaning of the first-person singular pronoun and challenges the association between the individual and the novel as a genre.