Through readings of works by Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley, David Marshall provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with theatricality and sympathy. Sympathy is seen not as an instance of sensibility or natural benevolence but rather as an aesthetic and epistemological problem that must be understood in relation to the problem of theatricality. Placing novels in the context of eighteenth-century writing about theater, fiction, and painting, Marshall argues that an unusual variety of authors and texts were concerned with the possibility of entering into someone else's thoughts and feelings. He shows how key eighteenth-century works reflect on the problem of how to move, touch, and secure the sympathy of readers and beholders in the realm of both "art" and "life." Marshall discusses the demands placed upon novels to achieve certain effects, the ambivalence of writers and readers about those effects, and the ways in which these texts can be read as philosophical meditations on the differences and analogies between the experiences of reading a novel, watching a play, beholding a painting, and witnessing the spectacle of someone suffering. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy traces the interaction of sympathy and theater and the artistic and philosophical problems that these terms represent in dialogues about aesthetics, moral philosophy, epistemology, psychology, autobiography, the novel, and society.

A crucial period for the birth of the modern subject, France's 'long eighteenth century' (approximately 1650-1820) was an era marked by the formulation of a new aesthetic and ethical code revolving around the intensification of emotions and the hyperbolic use of weeping. Precisely because tears are not a simple biological fact but rather hang suspended between natural immediacy, on one side, and cultural artifice, on the other, the analysis of crying came to represent an exemplary testing ground for investigations into the enigmatic relations binding the realm of physiology to that of psychology. Thinking About Tears explores how the link between tears and sensibility in France's long eighteenth century helps shed light on the process through which the European emotional lexicon has been built: from viewing tears as governed by the sphere of 'passions' and 'feelings', thinkers began to view crying as first a matter of sensibility and then of sensiblerie (a pathological excess of sensibility), thereby presupposing an intimate connection with the category of 'sentiments'. For this reason, this volume examines not only or even primarily the actual emotion of crying, but also the attempt to think about and explain this feeling. Drawing on a wide range of early modern philosophical, medical, religious, and literary texts-including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, letters, life-writings, novels, and stage-plays-Thinking About Tears reveals another side to a period that has too often been saddled with the cursory label of 'the age of reason'.

The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne offers students and teachers an introduction to Hawthorne s fiction and the lively debates that shape Hawthorne studies today. In newly commissioned essays, twelve eminent scholars of American literature introduce readers to key issues in Hawthorne scholarship and deepen our understanding of Hawthorne s writing. Each of the major novels is treated in a separate chapter, while other essays explore Hawthorne s art in relation to a stimulating array of issues and approaches. The essays reveal how Hawthorne s work explores understandings of gender relations and sexuality, of childhood and selfhood, of politics and ethics, of history and modernity. An Introduction and a selected bibliography will help students and teachers understand how Hawthorne has been a crucial figure for each generation of readers of American literature.

In the second half of the eighteenth century the female reader was a frequent topic of cultural debate and moral concern. This book examines the variety of ways in which women ‘read’ the social world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel.

Ian Kidd, of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, has long been known as a world-class scholar of ancient philosophy and of Posidonius, in particular. Through his long struggle with the fragments of Posidonius, Kidd has done more than any other scholar of ancient philosophy to dispel the myth of "Pan-Posidonianism." He has presented a clearer picture of the Posidonius to whom we may have access. The Passionate Intellect is both a Festschrift offered to Professor Kidd and an important collection of essays on the transformation of classical traditions. The bulk of this volume is built around the theme of Kidd's own inaugural lecture at St. Andrews, "The Passionate Intellect." Many of the contributions follow this theme through by examining how individual people and texts influenced the direction of various traditions. The chapters cover the whole of the classical and late antique periods, including the main genres of classical literature and history, and the gradual emergence of Christian literature and themes in late antiquity. Many of the papers naturally concentrate on ancient philosophy and its legacy. Others deal with ancient literary theory, history, poetry, and drama. Most of the papers deal with their subjects at some length and are significant contributions in their own right. The contributors to this collection include key figures hi contemporary classical scholarship, including: C. Carey (London); C. J. Classen (Gottingen); J. Dillon (Dublin); K. J. Dover (St. Andrews); W. W. Fortenbaugh (Rutgers); H. M. Hine (St. Andrews); J. Mansfeld (Utrecht); R. Janko and R. Sharpies (London); and J. S. Richardson (Edinburgh). This book will be invaluable to philosophers, classicists, and cultural historians.

In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

In the Channel zone, the novel developed through interactions among texts, readers, writers, and translators that inextricably linked national literary cultures. It served as a forum to promote and critique nationalist cliches, whether from the standpoint of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the insurgent nationalism of colonized spaces, or the non-nationalized culture of consumption. In the process, the Channel zone promoted codes that became the genre's hallmarks, including the sentimental poetics that would shape fiction through the nineteenth century.