Novel Readers and the Empathetic Angel of Our Nature

Abstract

My book Empathy and the Novel (2007) was full of questions. It off ered a preliminary defi nition of narrative empathy, later refi ned for my contribution to The Living Handbook of Narratology. Observing that narrative empathy is a prominent feature of the novel-reading experience, I described it as involving “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition” and argued that it “plays a role in the aesthetics of production when authors experience it, in mental simulation during reading, in the aesthetics of reception when readers experience it, and in the narrative poetics of texts when formal strategies invite it” (Keen “Narrative Empathy”). Rather than rehearsing all the arguments I put forth in Empathy and the Novel, this chapter touches just my contentions about narrative empathy and altruism, following up on research and theorizing that has been undertaken since 2007.