Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English “sympathy” and German “Einfühlung,” “empathy” is a specifically twentieth-century concept of fellow feeling. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism looks at the intertwined histories of empathy and modernist narrative in order to advance new portraits of both. Reconsidering the conditions of modernism’s “inward turn,” this book shows how five exemplary writers (Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf) ta ... More

Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English “sympathy” and German “Einfühlung,” “empathy” is a specifically twentieth-century concept of fellow feeling. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism looks at the intertwined histories of empathy and modernist narrative in order to advance new portraits of both. Reconsidering the conditions of modernism’s “inward turn,” this book 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. 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. Examining this literary shift helps us see how sympathy, once understood as the core of moral life, came to be widely understood as a “feeling for” that is inferior to empathic “feeling with.” It is no coincidence that “empathy,” an esoteric psychological term in the first years of the twentieth century, was widely known and lauded by the middle of the century. Modernist narrative trained readers to believe that a more radical joining of subjectivities was possible. But literary modernism is also teeming with voices that recognize potential violence in empathy, signalling that fellow feeling is an act whose dangers we must constantly assess.