The Art of Sympathy in Fiction -- Editorial page -- Title page -- LCC page -- Dedication page -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. Sympathy and narrative: Theoretical assumptions -- 1. Believable fictions: On the nature of emotional responses to fictional characters -- 1.1 Character and the question of believability -- 1.2 Emotional responses to fictional characters -- 2. Defining sympathy: Experiential and ethical dimensions -- 2.1 Empathy: The chameleon emotion -- 2.2 Towards a working definition of sympathy -- 2.3 Sympathy: A "moral sentiment"? -- 2.4 Real-life and narrative sympathy: Experiential differences and ethical implications -- 3. Forms of persuasion: Narrative approaches to the construction of reader sympathy -- 3.1 Narrative empathy or sympathy? The role of aesthetic distance -- 3.2 The poetics of narrative sympathy -- Part II. Literary critical and empirical case studies -- 4. Varieties of narrative sympathy: Two preliminary case studies -- 4.1 The clothes make the man: Fantastic empathy and realistic sympathy in Roth's "Eli, the Fanatic" -- 4.1.1 Challenging realistic conventions -- 4.1.2 Naturalizing a strange reality: Stereotyping as a strategy for creating verisimilitude -- 4.1.3 Defamiliarizing readers' perceptions -- 4.1.4 Fantastic empathy and realistic sympathy -- 4.1.5 Reevaluating "reality" -- 4.2 Sympathy as self-discovery: The significance of caring for others in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Betray -- 4.2.1 Lost in the marshlands: Cognitive estrangement and the cultivation of empathy -- 4.2.2 Abberkam as Other: "Emotional estrangement" and reader judgment -- 4.2.3 The rehabilitation of Abberkam: Revised judgment and the beginnings of sympathy -- 4.2.4 The restoration of Self: Sympathetic caring comes full-circle.

5. Shades of sympathy: The limits and possibilities of identification in Bambara's "The Hammer Man" -- 5.1 Structure and response: Some theoretical approaches to reader emotions -- 5.2 Surprised by sympathy: The effects of delayed exposition -- 5.3 Empirical approaches to "The Hammer Man" -- 5.3.1 Defining sympathy: A brief review -- 5.3.2 Methods and subjects -- 5.3.3 Results -- 5.3.4 General discussion of the test results -- 6. Sympathetic "grotesque": The dynamics of feeling in Sherwood Anderson's "Hands" -- 6.1 The making of a sympathetic "grotesque" -- 6.2 The Dynamics of feeling in "Hands" -- 6.3 The Reader Emotions Test (RET) for "Hands" -- 6.3.1 Methods and subjects -- 6.3.2 Results for Test A -- 6.3.3 Results for Test B -- 6.3.4 General discussion -- Part III. Sympathy in the classroom -- 7. Narrative as experience: The pedagogical implications of sympathizing with fictional characters -- 7.1 The End of innocence? Adolescent development and narrative fiction -- 7.2 Making sense of sympathy: Pedagogical approaches to understanding narrative experiences -- 7.3 Concluding remarks on student engagement -- 8. Conclusion -- 8.1 Empiricism, interdisciplinarity and literary studies: Obstacles and opportunities -- 8.2 Implications for literary and interdisciplinary study -- References -- Index.