Literary Sympathy

Everybody knows that sympathy connects and moves people. This truism not only rests on a number of complex assumptions and a long history: sympathy also lies at the root of aesthetic experience. If literary texts are to realize their potential in taking pragmatic and cultural effect, we need to be affected by them in certain ways. To explain these is the aim of the poetics of sympathy to be presented in a book-length study. It seeks to describe and clarify the dynamic that renders works of art capable of interacting with their recipients emotionally as well as cognitively, for their own as well as the greater good – or evil. This involves not only a systematic analysis of sympathy’s affinities with the literary, but also a partial retelling of literary history as informed by, and in turn transforming, the intellectual history of sympathy. The project’s trajectory spans European literature from Posidonios to J. A. Baker, from antiquity to the present, with a special emphasis on English texts. Offering a re-definition of poetic function under changing historical conditions, Literary Sympathy will thus chart the way toward the key concept of intersubjectivity that sympathy has become in our day.