Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction

Maria C. Scott’s excellent, engaging new book asks what fictional strangers might tell us about readers’ empathy in encounters with fiction. [...] a strangeness so very brilliantly illuminated here by Scott, in this absorbing book abounding with insights for literary and empirical scholars alike. -- Matt Phillips, University of London * French Studies *
In this elegantly written and consistently interesting study of representations of and encounters with strangers in three nineteenth-century French novels—by Balzac, Stendhal, and Sand—Maria C. Scott deploys ideas drawn from the interdisciplinary study of empathy to illuminate the dynamics of fiction reading. -- Suzanne Keen, Hamilton College * Modern Language Review *
Does fiction train us in empathy? Scott’s clever and wonderfully engaging book provides a powerful response to correct the idea of empathy as a simple key to unlock others and instead shows how empathy is a form of seduction. The task of the reader is both to fall for this seduction and to resist it. -- Fritz Breithaupt, author of The Dark Sides of Empathy and Provost Prof at Indiana University