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Empathy and the psychology of literary modernism / Meghan Marie Hammond

Author
Hammond, Meghan Marie
Published
Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2014]
Copyright Date
©2014
Physical Description
1 online resource (203 pages)
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Language Note
English.
Contents
Introduction: The problem of other minds and the Fin de Siècle world -- Into other minds: William and Henry James -- Dorothy Richardson's modernist innovation -- Communities of feeling in Katherine Mansfield's fiction -- Empathy and violence in the works of Ford Madox Ford -- Virginia Woolf and the limits of empathy -- Coda: New structures of fellow feeling.
Summary
Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English 'sympathy' and German 'EinfÃơhlung,' 'empathy' is a specifically twentieth-century concept of fellow feeling. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism looks into the little-known history of empathy, revealing how this multi-faceted concept had a profound effect on literary modernism. Meghan Marie Hammond shows how five exemplary writers (Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf) tackle the so-called 'problem of other minds' in ways that reflect and enrich early twentieth-century discourses of fellow feeling. Hammond argues that these authors reconfigure notions of intersubjective experience; their writings mark a key shift away from sympathetic forms of literary representation toward empathic forms that strive to provide an immediate sense of another's thoughts and feelings. But while literary modernism values empathic experience as an ideal, it is also teeming with voices that recognize potential for danger, even violence, in acts of empathy. These voices illuminate our culture's ongoing concern with empathy's limits. Key Features:. Recovers early psychology, a discipline that has often been neglected in favor of psychoanalysis, as a framework for literary modernism Provides a conceptual history of empathy that expands our understanding of the modernist world Grants new insight into modernist technique by explaining how it relates to contemporaneous psychological and aesthetic theories on empathy Prompts a rethinking of empathy, a capacity that is as widely misunderstood as it is celebrated
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ISBN
9781474406376 (electronic bk.)
1474406378 (electronic bk.)
9780748690992 (electronic bk.)
0748690999 (electronic bk.)
9780748690985 (hbk.)
0748690980 (hbk.)
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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