ABSTRACT
This excerpted essay describes the influence that readers’ differing identities have on their responses to fiction, especially the fictional characters with whom they empathize. It advances Keen’s project of analyzing readers’ empathy by means of an intersectional narratology, an analytic method that can accommodate a rich set of multiple, competing aspects of identity that provoke divergent responses to texts intended to evoke empathy. References appear in the volume’s Works Cited.
