Empathy in the Reading and Teaching of English Literature

Empathy in the Reading and Teaching of Literature explores the educational potential of empathy for literary studies across a historical, generic and geographic continuum. The book draws on interdisciplinary methodologies to offer new readings of popularly taught literary texts and discuss their relation to empathy. As a result, the book resists neoliberalism’s commodification of empathy and makes recommendations for the future of the teaching of literature at school and university. The book begins by providing a theoretical and historical overview of empathy as a term and educational tool in the English speaking context. The first two chapters lay the groundwork for the remaining close reading chapters by introducing two new terms: ‘pop empathy’ and ‘empathic education’. I argue that pop empathy is defined by neoliberalism and the commodification of empathy in marketing, advertising, politics and artificial intelligence and that this is impacting the rhetoric of contemporary educational policy in Australia and the United States. Empathic education is defined by educational theory and practice where the experience of empathy is foregrounded as a form of knowledge creation or acquisition. I draw pop empathy and empathic education into conversation throughout the book and use both terms to assist my argument that a complex approach to empathy for literary studies may benefit classroom teaching and learning by resisting over-systematised education. The remaining chapters of the book offer four unique approaches to empathic literary criticism informed by interdisciplinary methodologies, including educational theory, cognitive science, the philosophy of psychology and literary studies. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 provide readings of texts frequently prescribed for English literary study belonging to different genres: Shakespeare's Hamlet, the poetry of John Keats, the short stories ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ and ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ by Flannery O’Connor, an