Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts

Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts

Fusillo, Massimo
Ercolino, Stefano

Hardcover

Series: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

Art Criticism & TheoryLiterary CriticismCognition

ISBN10: 1032958723
ISBN13: 9781032958729
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Dec 23 2025
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.96
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts explores how readers and viewers engage cognitively and affectively with ethically troubling artworks across literature, the visual and performing arts, and screen media. Drawing on aesthetics, cultural history and theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Stefano Ercolino and Massimo Fusillo introduce the concept of negative empathy to describe the ambivalent and destabilizing emotional responses elicited by representations of negativity in art. Rather than dismissing empathy as naïve, the authors argue for a more nuanced understanding of its darker forms and their cognitive and ethical value. Through a comparative and intermedial approach, the book analyzes case studies from Littell's The Kindly Ones to Wilson's Deafman Glance; from Verdi's Macbeth and Nitsch's Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries to Caravaggio's Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio, Kiefer's The Seven Heavenly Palaces, Haneke's The White Ribbon, and Gilligan's Breaking Bad--offering a compelling new theory of aesthetic engagement.

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