Focuses on the sympathetic effects of stories, and the possible ways these feelings can contribute to what has been called the "moral imagination." This book examines the dynamics of readers' beliefs regarding fictional characters and the influence of those impressions on the emotions that readers experience.

We have to find our way back to beauty," writes Lars Spuybroek in the introduction to The Sympathy of Things. In this book Spuybroek argues that we must "undo" the twentieth century - the age in which the sublime turned from an art category into a technical reality. This leads him to the aesthetical insights of the nineteenth-century English art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for our time. In The Sympathy of Things, the old romantic notion of sympathy, a core concept in Ruskin's aesthetics, is re-evaluated as the driving force of the aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century. Spuybroek addresses the five central dual themes of Ruskin in turn: the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time, ecology and design. He wrests each of these themes from the Victorian era and compares them with the related ideas of later aestheticians and philosophers like William James and Bruno Latour.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1910 Edition.

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”

“A friend in history,” Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “looks like some premature soul.” And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation’s literature. In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America’s greatest writing--the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature--a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.