Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?

Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0400-4
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 296 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 478 g

Blakey Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist.

Vermeule examines the ways in which readers’ experiences of literature are affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. She focuses on a range of topics, from intimate articulations of sexual desire, gender identity, ambition, and rivalry to larger issues brought on by rapid historical and economic change. Vermeule discusses the phenomenon of emotional attachment to literary characters primarily in terms of 18th-century British fiction but also considers the postmodern work of Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Chinua Achebe.

From the perspective of cognitive science, Vermeule finds that caring about literary characters is not all that different from caring about other people, especially strangers. The tools used by literary authors to sharpen and focus reader interest tap into evolved neural mechanisms that trigger a caring response.

This book contributes to the emerging field of evolutionary literary criticism. Vermeule draws upon recent research in cognitive science to understand the mental processes underlying human social interactions without sacrificing solid literary criticism. People interested in literary theory, in cognitive analyses of the arts, and in Darwinian approaches to human culture will find much to ponder in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vermeule, Blakey

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Acknowledgments
1. The Fictional among Us
2. The Cognitive Dimension
3. What Hails Us?
4. The Literary Endowment: Five Mind-Reading Turns
Four Openings
Free Indirect Discourse
Machiavellian Narratives
Attention
The Drama of Differential Access to Social Information
5. The Fantasy of Exposure and Narrative Development in Eighteenth-Century Britain
6. God Novels
7. Gossip and Literary Narratives
8. What's the Matter with Miss Bates?
9. Mind Blindness
10. Postmodernism Reflects: J. M. Coetzee and the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Vermeule, Blakey
Blakey Vermeule is an associate professor of English at Stanford University and author of The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, also published by Johns Hopkins.