ABSTRACT
This excerpted essay extends Keen’s thinking about readers’ divergent empathic responses, augmenting her cursory treatment of the topic in Empathy and the Novel. While empathic accuracy is a de facto expectation of a comprehending reading of fiction, Keen argues, the gap-filling imagination of co-creative readers can lead to misdirected narrative empathy, orempathic inaccuracy. References appear in the volume’s Works Cited.
