Book News: Enriching our understanding of literary empathy

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. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

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.