Modernist Empathy
Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny

Shows how reading modernist literature gives us fresh insights into tensions within the empathetic imagination and empathy itself.

Eve C. Sorum (Author)

9781108498722, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 June 2019

234 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.6 cm, 0.48 kg

This book shows how reading modernist literature gives us a fresh and necessary insight into both the tensions within the empathetic imagination and the idea of empathy itself. Writers such as Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Mary Borden, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf encourage us to enter other perspectives even as they question the boundaries between self and other and, hence, the very possibility of empathy. Eve Sorum maintains that we must think through this complex literary heritage, focusing on the geographic and elegiac modes of the empathetic imagination, and revealing empathy as more fraught, threatening, and even uncanny than it first appears. Modernist Empathy thereby forges a theory of literary empathy as an act not of orientation, but of disorientation, thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of both modernist literature and the concept of literary empathy.

Illustration
Acknowledgments
1. Modernizing empathy, locating loss
2. Disorientation, elegy, and the uncanny: modernist empathy through Hardy
3. Disorienting empathy: World War I and the traumas of perspective-taking
4. Elegizing empathy: Eliot and the subject-object divide
5. Uncanny empathy: Woolf's half-life of objects
Conclusion: performing empathy?
Notes
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]