There is little doubt that sympathy plays a pivotal role in aesthetic as well as moral experience, yet also little agreement on how to describe this connection and its long history. This volume investigates the changes in the concept of sympathy as well as its rhetorical, poetical and ethical functions from antiquity to the threshold of Romanticism. The focus is on sympathy's development from a cosmological principle expressing the coherence, correspondence, and unity of all things into a theoretical key concept of intersubjectivity informing moral philosophy, criticism and literature. Thus,...

How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason...