In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to 'feeling with' others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from...

Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English 'sympathy' and German 'Einfuhlung, ' '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...