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This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.

This book offers a new rationale for the place of literary reading in the well-lived life. While it is often assumed that fictions must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit to us, certain texts defy this assumption by functioning as training-grounds for the capacities: in engaging with them we stand not to become more knowledgeable or more virtuous but more skilled, whether at rational thinking, at maintaining necessary illusions, at achieving tranquillity of mind, or even at religious faith. Instead of offering us propositional knowledge, these texts yield know-how; rather than attempting to instruct by means of their content, they hone capacities by means of their form; far from seducing with the promise of instantaneous transformation, they recognize, with Aristotle, that change is a matter of sustained and patient practice. Their demands are high, but the reward they promise is nothing short of a more richly lived life.

This book examines the place of literature in the Reformation, considering both how arguments about biblical meaning and literary interpretation influenced the new theology, and how developments in theology in turn influenced literary practices. Part One focuses on Northern Europe, reconsidering the relationship between Renaissance humanism (especially Erasmus) and religious ideas (especially Luther). Parts Two and Three examine Tudor and early Stuart England. Part Two describes the rise of vernacular theology and Protestant culture in relation to fundamental changes in the understanding of the English language. Part Three studies English religious poetry (including Donne, Herbert, and, in an Epilogue, Milton) in the wake of these changes. Bringing together genres and styles of writing that are normally kept apart (poems, sermons, treatises, commentaries), the author offers a re-evaluation of the literary production of this intensely verbal and controversial period.

Founded on a deep disagreement with current criticism of the novel, this book challenges a longstanding consensus that the nineteenth-century novel indelibly registers bourgeois ideology and morality, assuming the novel’s default position is conservative and hegemonic. Systematically under-reading democratic imaginations, this critique emerges alike from Marxists, from readers of nineteenth-century liberalism, and from critics making claims for the working-class novel. To undo such readings the book addresses some classic nineteenth-century political texts—by John Stuart Mill, de Tocqueville, and Hegel. But its core is a new poetics of the novel based on four claims: that the novel is an open Inquiry, a lived interrogation, on analogy with the form of earlier philosophical inquiries, not a predetermined political document; that radical thinking requires radical formal experiment, creating generic disruption and putting the so-called realist text and its values under pressure; that the poetics of social and phenomenological space reveals the dispossessed subject, not the bildung of success or overcoming; that the presence of the aesthetic and artworks in the novel is a constant source of social questioning. Illegitimacy, with its challenge to social norms, is a test case, from Scott and Jane Austen to George Eliot and George Moore, the growing point of democratic imagination.

The Art of Cinematic Storytelling: A Visual Guide to Planning Shots, Cuts, and Transitions is a practical introduction to the design of shots, cuts, and transitions for film, video, television, animation, and game design. The author-illustrator is a storyboard artist who has worked with and learned from over 200 professional directors and cinematographers. This book’s clear and concise explanations and vivid examples demystify the visual design choices that are fundamental to directing and editing. Hundreds of illustrations and diagrams support the text. The primary emphasis is on blocking actors and positioning the camera for mood, meaning, and continuity editing. This book delves deeply into controlling the audience’s understanding and perception of time and space; designing in-camera time transitions; compressing and expanding time; composing creative shots for cinematic storytelling; choosing between objective and subjective storytelling; motivating camera moves; choosing lenses; using screen geography and film grammar for clarity; planning shots with continuity editing in mind; knowing how and when to cut; beginning and ending scenes; and using storyboards for planning and communication. Several chapters are devoted to how to block and shoot action involving travel, pursuits, searches, dialogue, groups, and driving. While the approach is based largely on well-established techniques of cinematography and continuity editing, attention is also given to jump cuts, tableau shots, and unconventional framing. The topics are covered thoroughly and systematically, and this book serves both as an introductory text and as a reference work for more advanced students of film.

This book contributes to the study of South African literature, offering readings of writers such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, and Mda. Focusing on the relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form, the study examines our understanding of apartheid as a geographical form of control, and of its imagined and actual transformation.

The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust. This book explores the means bywhich the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as earlyBlack and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals,and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

This book surveys trends in environmental thought in the US from the mid-19th century to the present day. Its author's chief interest is in ecocriticism — a new field of inquiry that focuses on environmental literature — and some key premises of which he calls into question. His perspective is, however, interdisciplinary: he considers literary alongside popular, philosophical, sociological, political, and scientific approaches to understanding the natural world, and attempts to weigh the relative strengths and weakness, and identify the biases of each approach. He also addresses a variety of more specific topics, including the shortcomings of arguments for the social construction of nature, the difference between literary and scientific realism, the supposed conflict between nature and culture, the American preoccupation with individual experience as reflected in the nature writing tradition, the difficulty of resolving ecological crises in light of the great complexity of nature, and the challenge of understanding all these issues from an interdisciplinary viewpoint that draws inspiration from both the arts and the sciences.

The question of the canon has been the subject of debate in academic circles for over fifteen years.Pleasure and Change contains two lectures on this important subject by the distinguished literary critic Sir Frank Kermode.