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9781474463034

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Does fiction train us in empathy? Scott's clever and wonderfully engaging book provides a powerful response to correct the idea of empathy as a simple key to unlock others and instead shows how empathy is a form of seduction. The task of the reader is both to fall for this seduction and to resist it.--Fritz Breithaupt, author of The Dark Sides of Empathy and Provost Prof at Indiana University In this elegantly written and consistently interesting study of representations of and encounters with strangers in three nineteenth-century French novels--by Balzac, Stendhal, and Sand--Maria C. Scott deploys ideas drawn from the interdisciplinary study of empathy to illuminate the dynamics of fiction reading.--Suzanne Keen, Hamilton College ""Modern Language Review"" Maria C. Scott's excellent, engaging new book asks what fictional strangers might tell us about readers' empathy in encounters with fiction. [...] a strangeness so very brilliantly illuminated here by Scott, in this absorbing book abounding with insights for literary and empirical scholars alike.--Matt Phillips, University of London ""French Studies""

"Does fiction train us in empathy? Scott's clever and wonderfully engaging book provides a powerful response to correct the idea of empathy as a simple key to unlock others and instead shows how empathy is a form of seduction. The task of the reader is both to fall for this seduction and to resist it.--Fritz Breithaupt, author of The Dark Sides of Empathy and Provost Prof at Indiana University In this elegantly written and consistently interesting study of representations of and encounters with strangers in three nineteenth-century French novels--by Balzac, Stendhal, and Sand--Maria C. Scott deploys ideas drawn from the interdisciplinary study of empathy to illuminate the dynamics of fiction reading.--Suzanne Keen, Hamilton College ""Modern Language Review"" Maria C. Scott's excellent, engaging new book asks what fictional strangers might tell us about readers' empathy in encounters with fiction. [...] a strangeness so very brilliantly illuminated here by Scott, in this absorbing book abounding with insights for literary and empirical scholars alike.--Matt Phillips, University of London ""French Studies"""

Author Information

Maria C. Scott is Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. She has published two monographs, Baudelaire's 'Le Spleen de Paris' Shifting Perspectives (Ashgate,2005) and Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female (Legenda,2013). The latter was published in French translation as Stendhal, la liberté et les héroïnes mal aimées (Classiques Garnier, 2015).The author is generally interested in the identificatory dynamics and blind spots that can affect literary interpretation.

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