Empathy in English Literature: From Victorian Feeling to Contemporary Voice

This volume examines empathy in English literature from the Victorian era to today, focusing on moments in which empathic response is constructed, tested, or redefined across texts and historical contexts. Victorian writers explore sympathy’s moral urgency and failure, showing how empathic response is rhetorically constructed. Modernist works frame it as a cognitive, formal process tied to embodiment and nature. Contemporary narratives test it against memory, trauma, and artificial beings. The volume presents empathy as a narrative strategy and ethically complex force. Through diverse case studies, it shows empathy operating between characters, within narrative forms, and between text and reader, revealing literature as a space for recovering silenced voices while exposing its possibilities and limits.