Scholars have often focused on understanding Aristotle's poetic theory, and particularly the concept of catharsis in the Poetics, as a response to Plato's critique of pity in the Republic. However, this book shows that, while Greek thinkers all acknowledge pity and some form of fear as responses to tragedy, each assumes for the two emotions a different purpose, mode of presentation and, to a degree, understanding. This book reassesses expressions of the emotions within different tragedies and explores emotional responses to and discussions of the tragedies by contemporary philosophers, providing insights into the ethical and social implications of the emotions.

In 1944, in northern Maine, a nine-year-old girl befriends a German prisoner of war who works with her in her father's potato fields. Includes recipes for Swedish pancakes and stollen

Product Description: How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others' autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily and troubling? Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D...read more

Product Description: By taking an interdisciplinary approach ― with methods drawn from narratology, aesthetics, social psychology, education, and the empirical study of literature ― The Art of Sympathy in Fiction will interest scholars in a variety of fields...read more

Product Description: Rae Greiner proposes that sympathy is integral to the form of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. Following the philosophy of Adam Smith, Greiner argues that sympathy does more than foster emotional identification with others; it is a way of thinking along with them...read more

Product Description: What happens when we engage with fictional characters? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between the literary and the philosophical, Sophie Ratcliffe onsiders the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling...read more

An old Indian woman comforts two young white children she finds lost in the woods and lovingly carries them back to their eager parents. A frontiersman sheds tears over the grave of a Mohican youth, holding hands with the mourning father. According to Laura L. Mielke, such emotionally charged scenes between whites and Indians paradoxically flourished in American literature from 1820 to 1850, a time when the United States government developed and applied a policy of Indian removal. Although these "moving encounters," as Mielke terms them, often promoted the possibility of mutual sympathy between Native Americans and Euro-Americans, they also suggested that these emotional links were inherently unstable, potentially dangerous, and ultimately doomed. At the same time, the emphasis on Indian-white sympathy provided an opportunity for Indians and non-Native activists to voice an alternative to removal and acculturation, turning the language of a sentimental U.S. culture against its own imperial impulse. Mielke details not only how such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft forecast the inevitable demise of Indian-white sympathy, but also how authors like Lydia Maria Child and William Apess insisted that a language of feeling could be used to create shared community or defend American Indian sovereignty. In this way, Moving Encounters sheds new light on a wide range of texts concerning the "Indian Question" by emphasizing their engagement with popular sentimental forms and by challenging the commonly held belief that all Euro-American expressions of sympathy for American Indians in this period were fundamentally insincere. While portraits of Indian-white sympathy often prompted cynical rejoinders from parodists, many never lost faith in the power of emotion to overcome the greed and prejudice fueling the dispossession of American Indians.

Product Description: This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.

Product Description: Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era explores a fascinating connection between two seemingly unrelated Romantic-era discourses, outlining the extent to which eighteenth and early nineteenth century theories of sympathy were generated by crises of state finance...read more

Product Description: "Impeccably, lucidly, and accessibly written . . . will contribute significantly to our understanding of an important intellectual 'thread' in American cultural and literary history."--Leland S. Person, University of Cincinnati"A coherent and helpful account of the history of attachment and sentimentality from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century ...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Hawthorne still baffles critics; no approach has succeeded in putting forward an accepted explanation of his works as a whole. Nobody has been able so far to assign him to any of the ideologies of his century. Hawthorne developed a religion of his own...read more

Product Description: A survey of the phases of Expressionism from its beginnings in 1905 to the 1970s. It examines Expressionist art in the context of the history of philosophy and social ideas and looks at the movement's intellectual milieu, subject matter, iconography, style, social psychology and art criticism...read more

Product Description: Novels Of Bernard Malamud, by Rajagopalachari, M.

Product Description: S.C.N. Presents fresh insights into Eliot's fiction by concentrating on her rhetoric. The author illuminates the theory of rhetoric by showing how one writer applied it and developed her craft from her early novels to her master-piece.