Rethinking Empathy Through Literature

Download Rethinking Empathy Through Literature full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Rethinking Empathy Through Literature ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Rethinking Empathy through Literature

Author : Meghan Marie Hammond
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317817370
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (178 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Rethinking Empathy through Literature by : Meghan Marie Hammond

Download or read book Rethinking Empathy through Literature written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism

Author : Meghan Marie Hammond
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (11 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism by : Meghan Marie Hammond

Download or read book Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism written by Meghan Marie Hammond and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how fin de siècleconceptions of empathy are woven into the fabric of literary modernism Empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a bridge across interpersonal distance. Coined in 1909 to combine English 'sympathy' and German 'Einfühlung,' 'empathy' is a specifically twentieth-century concept of fellow feeling. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism looks into the little-known history of empathy, revealing how this multi-faceted concept had a profound effect on literary modernism. Meghan Marie Hammond shows how five exemplary writers (Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf) tackle the so-called 'problem of other minds' in ways that reflect and enrich early twentieth-century discourses of fellow feeling. Hammond argues that these authors reconfigure notions of intersubjective experience; their writings mark a key shift away from sympathetic forms of literary representation toward empathic forms that strive to provide an immediate sense of another's thoughts and feelings. But while literary modernism values empathic experience as an ideal, it is also teeming with voices that recognize potential for danger, even violence, in acts of empathy. These voices illuminate our culture's ongoing concern with empathy's limits. Key Features: Recovers early psychology, a discipline that has often been neglected in favor of psychoanalysis, as a framework for literary modernism Provides a conceptual history of empathy that expands our understanding of the modernist world Grants new insight into modernist technique by explaining how it relates to contemporaneous psychological and aesthetic theories on empathy Prompts a rethinking of empathy, a capacity that is as widely misunderstood as it is celebrated

The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism

Author : Donald R. Wehrs
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319633031
Total Pages : 883 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (196 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism by : Donald R. Wehrs

Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 883 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature

Author : Isabel Jaen
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190256567
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature by : Isabel Jaen

Download or read book Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature written by Isabel Jaen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature is the first anthology exploring human cognition and literature in the context of early modern Spanish culture. It includes the leading voices in the field, along with the main themes and directions that this important area of study has been producing. The book begins with an overview of the cognitive literary studies research that has been taking place within early modern Spanish studies over the last fifteen years. Next, it traces the creation of self in the context of the novel, focusing on Cervantes's Don Quixote in relation to the notions of embodiment and autopoiesis as well as the faculties of memory and imagination as understood in early modernity. It continues to explore the concept of embodiment, showing its relevance to delve into the mechanics of the interaction between actors and audience both in the jongleuresque and the comedia traditions. It then centers on cognitive theories of perception, the psychology of immersion in fictional worlds, and early modern and modern-day notions of intentionality to discuss the role of perceiving and understanding others in performance, Don Quixote, and courtly conduct manuals. The last section focuses on the affective dimension of audience-performer interactions in the theatrical space of the Spanish corrales and how emotion and empathy can inform new approaches to presenting Las Casas's work in the literature classroom. The volume closes with an afterword offering strategies to design a course on mind and literature in early modernity.

Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art

Author : Thomas Petraschka
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000960374
Total Pages : 389 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art by : Thomas Petraschka

Download or read book Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art written by Thomas Petraschka and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-03 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume critically discusses the role empathy plays in different processes of understanding. More precisely, it clarifies empathy’s role in interpersonal understanding and appreciating works of literature and art. The volume also includes a section on historical theories of empathy’s role in understanding. When it comes to understanding other persons, empathy is typically seen as a process that enables the empathizer to recognize a target person’s mental states, a process which is in turn seen as “understanding” this person. This volume, however, explores empathy’s role in understanding beyond mere mental state recognition. With contributions on processes of interpersonal understanding and understanding of literature and art, it provides readers with an overview over both differences and similarities regarding empathy’s epistemic role in two rather different areas. Since important roots of the debate about empathic understanding lie at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the historical section of the volume focusses specifically on this period. Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics and the history of philosophy, as well as in literary studies and art history.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion

Author : Patrick Colm Hogan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000548449
Total Pages : 649 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion by : Patrick Colm Hogan

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion written by Patrick Colm Hogan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion shows how the "affective turn" in the humanities applies to literary studies. Deftly combining the scientific elements with the literary, the book provides a theoretical and topical introduction to reading literature and emotion. Looking at a variety of formats, including novels, drama, film, graphic fiction, and lyric poetry, the book also includes focus on specific authors such as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. The volume introduces the theoretical groundwork, covering such categories as affect theory, affective neuroscience, cognitive science, evolution, and history of emotions. It examines the range of emotions that play a special role in literature, including happiness, fear, aesthetic delight, empathy, and sympathy, as well as aspects of literature (style, narrative voice, and others) that bear on emotional response. Finally, it explores ethical and political concerns that are often intertwined with emotional response, including racism, colonialism, disability, ecology, gender, sexuality, and trauma. This is a crucial guide to the ways in which new, interdisciplinary understandings of emotion and affect—in fields from neuroscience to social theory—are changing the study of literature and of the ways those new understandings are impacted by work on literature also.

Prose Poetry

Author : Paul Hetherington
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691180644
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Prose Poetry by : Paul Hetherington

Download or read book Prose Poetry written by Paul Hetherington and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry’s key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today’s most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry’ s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women’s essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.

Empathy and Reading

Author : Suzanne Keen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100059520X
Total Pages : 285 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Empathy and Reading by : Suzanne Keen

Download or read book Empathy and Reading written by Suzanne Keen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-23 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering collection brings together Suzanne Keen’s extensive body of work on empathy and reading, charting the development of narrative empathy as an area of inquiry in its own right and extending cross-disciplinary conversations about empathy evoked by reading. The volume offers a brief overview of the trajectory of research following the 2007 publication of Empathy and the Novel, with empathy understood as a suite of related phenomena as stimulated by representations in narratives. The book is organized around three thematic sections—theories; empathetic readers; and interdisciplinary applications—each preceded by a short framing essay. The volume features excerpts from the author’s seminal works on narrative empathy and makes available her harder-to-access contributions. The book brings different strands of the author’s research into conversation with existing debates, with the aim of inspiring future interdisciplinary research on narrative empathy. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in such fields as literary studies, cognitive science, emotion studies, affect studies, and applied contexts where empathetic practitioners work.

Violence Against Indigenous Women

Author : Allison Hargreaves
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN 13 : 1771122501
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (711 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Violence Against Indigenous Women by : Allison Hargreaves

Download or read book Violence Against Indigenous Women written by Allison Hargreaves and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis, with roots deep in the nation’s colonial history. Despite numerous policies and programs developed to address the issue, Indigenous women continue to be targeted for violence at disproportionate rates. What insights can literature contribute where dominant anti-violence initiatives have failed? Centring the voices of contemporary Indigenous women writers, this book argues for the important role that literature and storytelling can play in response to gendered colonial violence. Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention. Violence Against Indigenous Women joins the conversation by analyzing the socially interventionist work of Indigenous women poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers. Organized as a series of case studies that pair literary interventions with recent sites of activism and policy-critique, the book puts literature in dialogue with anti-violence debate to illuminate new pathways toward action. With the advent of provincial and national inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, a larger public conversation is now underway. Indigenous women’s literature is a critical site of knowledge-making and critique. Violence Against Indigenous Women provides a foundation for reading this literature in the context of Indigenous feminist scholarship and activism and the ongoing intellectual history of Indigenous women’s resistance.

Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction

Author : Maria C. Scott
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474463053
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction by : Maria C. Scott

Download or read book Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction written by Maria C. Scott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how and why narrative fiction engages empathy, including Theory of MindOffers a broad overview of current scientific work on the effects of fiction-reading on empathy, including Theory of MindProvides an original intervention in the field of literary theory, centring on the reflexive properties of the fictional strangerIncludes stand-alone close readings of three novels by important French authorsThis book studies recent psychological findings which suggest that reading fiction cultivates empathy, encouraging us to be critically reflective, suspicious readers as well as participatory, 'nave' readers. Scott draws on literary theory and close readings to argue that engagement with fictional stories also teaches us to resist uncritical forms of empathy and reminds us of the limitations of our ability to understand other people. The book treats figures of the stranger in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir and Sand's Indiana as emblematic of the strangeness of narrative fiction, both drawing us in and keeping us at a distance.

Before Humanity

Author : Stefan Herbrechter
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004502505
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (45 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Before Humanity by : Stefan Herbrechter

Download or read book Before Humanity written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?

Levinas and Literature

Author : Michael Fagenblat
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110668998
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Levinas and Literature by : Michael Fagenblat

Download or read book Levinas and Literature written by Michael Fagenblat and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas’s deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas’s draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and François-David Sebbah, among others.

A Companion to Literary Theory

Author : David H. Richter
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1118958675
Total Pages : 501 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (189 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A Companion to Literary Theory by : David H. Richter

Download or read book A Companion to Literary Theory written by David H. Richter and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces readers to the modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century A Companion to Literary Theory is a collection of 36 original essays, all by noted scholars in their field, designed to introduce the modes and ideas of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Arranged by topic rather than chronology, in order to highlight the relationships between earlier and most recent theoretical developments, the book groups its chapters into seven convenient sections: I. Literary Form: Narrative and Poetry; II. The Task of Reading; III. Literary Locations and Cultural Studies; IV. The Politics of Literature; V. Identities; VI. Bodies and Their Minds; and VII. Scientific Inflections. Allotting proper space to all areas of theory most relevant today, this comprehensive volume features three dozen masterfully written chapters covering such subjects as: Anglo-American New Criticism; Chicago Formalism; Russian Formalism; Derrida and Deconstruction; Empathy/Affect Studies; Foucault and Poststructuralism; Marx and Marxist Literary Theory; Postcolonial Studies; Ethnic Studies; Gender Theory; Freudian Psychoanalytic Criticism; Cognitive Literary Theory; Evolutionary Literary Theory; Cybernetics and Posthumanism; and much more. Features 36 essays by noted scholars in the field Fills a growing need for companion books that can guide readers through the thicket of ideas, systems, and terminologies Presents important contemporary literary theory while examining those of the past The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory will be welcomed by college and university students seeking an accessible and authoritative guide to the complex and often intimidating modes of literary and cultural study of the previous half century.

Emotional Practice in Old English Literature

Author : Alice Jorgensen
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843847051
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Emotional Practice in Old English Literature by : Alice Jorgensen

Download or read book Emotional Practice in Old English Literature written by Alice Jorgensen and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how emotions were practised and performed through Old English texts.Scholarship is increasingly interested in investigating concepts of emotion found in Old English literature. This study takes the next step, arguing that both heroic and religious texts were vehicles for emotional practice - that is, for doing things with emotion. Using case studies from heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon), religious poetry (Christ I and Christ III) and homilies (selections from the Vercelli Book, Blickling Homilies and the works of Wulfstan), it shows via detailed close readings that texts could be used to act out emotional styles, manage the emotions arising from specific events, and negotiate relationships both within social groups and with God. Meanwhile, a chapter on the Old English Boethius explores how the control of unruly emotions is theorized as the transfer of attachment from the things of this world to the things of the divine. Overall, the volume offers new angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal.

Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice

Author : Gabriel García Ochoa
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030599043
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice by : Gabriel García Ochoa

Download or read book Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice written by Gabriel García Ochoa and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores a new approach to cultural literacy. Taking a pedagogical perspective, it looks at the skills, knowledge, and abilities involved in understanding and interpreting cultural differences, and proposes new ways of approaching such differences as sources of richness in intercultural and interdisciplinary collaborations. Cultural Literacy and Empathy in Education Practice balances theory with practice, providing practical examples for educators who wish to incorporate cultural literacy into their teaching. The book includes case studies, interviews with teachers and students, and examples of exercises and assessments, all backed by years of robust scholarly research.

Women in German Expressionism

Author : Anke Finger
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472903675
Total Pages : 373 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (729 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Women in German Expressionism by : Anke Finger

Download or read book Women in German Expressionism written by Anke Finger and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection, for the first time, explores women’s self-conceptions and representations of women’s and gender roles in society in their own Expressionist works. How did women approach themes commonly considered to be characteristic of the Expressionist movement, and did they address other themes or aesthetics and styles not currently represented in the canon? Women in German Expressionism centers its analysis on gender, together with difference, ethnicity, intersectionality, and identity, to approach artworks and texts in more nuanced ways, engaging solidly established theoretical and sociohistorical approaches that enhance and update our understanding of the material under investigation. It moves beyond the masculine, “New Man,” viewpoint so firmly associated with German Expressionism and examines alternative, critical, and divergent interpretations of the changing world at the time. This collection seeks to broaden the theorization, scholarship, and reception of German Expressionism by—much belatedly—including works by women, and by shifting or redefining firmly established concepts and topics carrying only the imprint of male authors and artists to this day.

Reading Slaughter

Author : Sune Borkfelt
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030989151
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (39 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Reading Slaughter by : Sune Borkfelt

Download or read book Reading Slaughter written by Sune Borkfelt and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity examines literary depictions of slaughterhouses from the development of the industrial abattoir in the late nineteenth century to today. The book focuses on how increasing and ongoing isolation and concealment of slaughter from the surrounding society affects readings and depictions of slaughter and abattoirs in literature, and on the degree to which depictions of animals being slaughtered creates an avenue for empathic reactions in the reader or the opportunity for reflections on human-animal relations. Through chapters on abattoir fictions in relation to narrative empathy, anthropomorphism, urban spaces, rural spaces, human identities and horror fiction, Sune Borkfelt contributes to debates in literary animal studies, human-animal studies and beyond.