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 p