The Politics of Sympathy and the Reading Experience

The Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction of Mary Ward and Marie Corelli
Can reading change the world? Late-nineteenth-century popular fiction thought the sympathetic reading experience could.
This book argues that the sympathy underpinning mid-nineteenth-century fiction’s ethics and author/reader relationships had a significant afterlife. It was crucial to Walter Besant’s fiction theory and politics as well as to other fin-de-siècle writers’ exploration of women’s philanthropy and the problems of poverty. What we now term 'empathy' was crucial to the very different fiction of Mary Ward and Marie Corelli and the social influence they wished to exert. Ward’s desire to stimulate sensitivity to the battle of political ideas about inequality is here compared to Corelli’s bond of sympathy with common readers which sought to combat a corrupt society and the derision of critics. Science and philosophy’s arguments about what empathy stimulated by reading can achieve is contrasted with new empirical evidence of readers’ reactions, including from the pages of local newspapers. This shows what Ward’s and Corelli’s fiction of debate achieved in raising awareness and influencing thinking.

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