Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction

Maria C. Scott is Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. She has published two monographs, Baudelaire’s ‘Le Spleen de Paris’: Shifting Perspectives (Ashgate,2005) and Stendhal’s Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female (Legenda,2013). The latter was published in French translation as Stendhal, la liberté et les héroïnes mal aimées (Classiques Garnier, 2015).The author is generally interested in the identificatory dynamics and blind spots that can affect literary interpretation.

• 1. Does reading fiction boost empathy? Psychological approaches2. Literary approaches to empathy3. Fictional strangers and the strangeness of fiction4. Balzac: the limits of transparency and the dangers of opacity 5. Stendhal and the two opposing demands 6. Sand and the necessity of suspicion7. Towards an empathetic ethics of fiction-readingBibliography

Maria C. Scott’s excellent, engaging new book asks what fictional strangers might tell us about readers’ empathy in encounters with fiction. [...] a strangeness so very brilliantly illuminated here by Scott, in this absorbing book abounding with insights for literary and empirical scholars alike.