Sympathetic Sentiments

John Jervis is Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He is the author of Exploring the Modern: Patterns of Western Culture and Civilization (1998) and Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness (2000) and the co-editor of Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (2008).

• AcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsGuest Preface1. Introduction2. Cloying Sentiments3. Sensibility and Sympathy in the Theatre of Tears4. Sympathy Theory5. From Sensibility to Affect?6. Unconscious Arts of Memory7. Trauma Trouble8. Sympathy, Sentiment and Media SpectaclePostscript: Empathy, Spectacle and Mirror-Touch SynaesthesiaNotesIndex

This book is a timely addition to the sometimes bewilderingly broad field of scholarship on sentiment and sympathy. It is a lively and richly illustrated discussion of the ways in which humans feel, think, recall, and imagine others. It patiently guides the reader through the complex historical transformations and surprising conceptual continuities that characterize the ways in which these abilities – and their translation into ethical actions – have been theorized from the eighteenth century to the present day.