Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy

· Cambridge University Press
Ebook
317
Pages
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About this ebook

An influential body of recent work on moral psychology has stressed the interconnections among ethics, narrative, and empathy. Yet as Patrick Colm Hogan argues, this work is so vague in its use of the term 'narrative' as to be almost substanceless, and this vagueness is in large part due to the neglect of literary study. Extending his previous work on universal story structures, Hogan argues that we can transform ill-defined intuitions about narrative and ethics into explicit and systematic accounts of the deep connections between moral attitudes and narratives. These connections are, in turn, inseparable from empathy, a concept that Hogan proceeds to clarify and defend against a number of widely read critiques. In the course of the book, Hogan develops and illustrates his arguments through analyses of global narratives, constructing illuminating ethical interpretations of literary works ranging from Shakespeare to Chinese drama and the Bhagavad Gita.

About the author

Patrick Colm Hogan, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the English Department and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Connecticut, is the author of over twenty scholarly books, including The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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