ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that understanding the role of empathy as mediation is crucial to explaining how it may be involved in transactions of human rights in literature and the arts. Scholars' rejection or embrace of empathy seems often to depend on whether the view it as an essential or tangential element of human rights aesthetics. The chapter examines a single case study of an early-nineteenth-century novel that attempts to theorize how literature and the arts imaginatively mediate emotions and understanding. Published in 1817, the novel Harrington by the Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth develops a theory of "inverted sympathy." With this term, Edgeworth seems to describe the kind of mediation accomplished by empathy, explored in the text through a transaction between two genres, the novel and the theater. In addition to publishing novels, Maria Edgeworth authored several volumes of popular stories for children. With her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria also published an influential pedagogical treatise in 1798, Practical Education.
