ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses aspects of readers’ engagement with characters represented in literature where those engagements have been claimed to be sympathetic or empathetic. Current accounts hold sympathy to be a more limited phenomenon than empathy, thus the chapter deals mostly with the latter. The scientific bases of claims about the role of empathy in literature are examined at two levels: the deeply sub-personal (conclusions drawn from readers’ neuronal changes) and the sub-personal (conclusions drawn from the structure of readers’ representation of the content of what they are reading). The chapter advises caution in drawing conclusions from these studies. It argues that, if they are to play a role in critical judgments on literature, sympathy and empathy need to be part of the readers’ conscious engagement with the text and examines two aspects of this: the need to balance “fiction emotions” and “artifact emotions” and the need for critical reflection on the arousal of sympathy and empathy.
