Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny
BY EVE C. SORUM
Cambridge UP, 2019
ISBN: 9781108595667
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernist-empathy/83F710997D411394B54BD1912C59A983
This book shows how reading modernist literature gives us a fresh and necessary insight into both the tensions within the empathetic imagination and the idea of empathy itself. Writers such as Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Mary Borden, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf encourage us to enter other perspectives even as they question the boundaries between self and other and, hence, the very possibility of empathy. Eve Sorum maintains that we must think through this complex literary heritage, focusing on the geographic and elegiac modes of the empathetic imagination, and revealing empathy as more fraught, threatening, and even uncanny than it first appears. Modernist Empathy thereby forges a theory of literary empathy as an act not of orientation, but of disorientation, thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of both modernist literature and the concept of literary empathy.
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Eve Sorum is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and was a Fulbright Scholar in Burkina Faso in 2013–14. She has published articles and essays on a range of topics, including the masochistic aesthetics of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, poetic self-elegies, and the democratic nostalgia of W. H. Auden.
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