Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to...

…empathy is the driving force behind the experience of emotions in narratives (Keen, 2006; Mar et al., 2006; Oatley, 2011).

Narratives are universally used for mediating emotional experiences. The purpose of aesthetic objects has been defined, in part, as ‘the awakening, intensifying, or maintaining of definite emotional states’ (Lee, 1913: 99–100). When we read or...

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were...

You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you...

Readers don’t want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions. . . . Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face...

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth...

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.

We want the author to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires.

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally...