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

This original interdisciplinary study argues that understanding how narrative works in literature is crucial to understanding moral thought.

Patrick Colm Hogan (Author)

9781009169516, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 May 2022

360 pages, 30 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.6 kg

'The morality tale in literature, and the thought experiment in moral philosophy, remind us that ethics and narrative are deeply entwined. In a superb example of consilience, breaching arbitrary disciplinary boundaries, Patrick Colm Hogan provides important new insights into how members of our species make sense of our feelings and obligations to one another.' Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and the author of How the Mind Works and Rationality

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.

Introduction: What (comparative) literature tells us about ethics
1. Defining ethics
2. The implied ethics of Julius Caesar
3. Narrative universals, emotion, and ethics
4. Ethics and narrative genre: Some illustrative cases
5. Emotion and empathy
6. The dynamics of empathic response: Simulation and inference in A Midsummer Night's Dream
7. Evaluating empathy
8. The critical empathy of Angels in America
Afterword: The limits of ethics – On free will and blame.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Literature & literary studies [D]