ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the narrower conception of empathy that in empathizing one responds to another conscious being and experiences the response as governed by and to some degree replicating how that other experiences his or her situation. In any case, empathy has the meaning within the empathizer's experience of manifesting the other's perspective and experience. Discussions of literature and empathy typically focus on the possibility, mechanisms, and value of empathizing with fictional characters. A literary work can make the potential, the limits, and strangeness of empathy into themes. The possibility of empathizing with fictional characters could be challenged as part of the long-standing philosophical debate about the status of attitudes and emotions directed at the merely fictional. The literary experience of empathy draws on psychological, imaginative, and interpretive capacities the chapter use in relating to people. Peter Lamarque suggests that emotional responses, including empathy, "tend to be too reader-relative or culture-specific" to "play a central role in literary criticism".
