What happens when we engage with fictional characters? What sort of cognitive activity and affective response does reading about imaginary figures involve? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between literary and philosophical analysis, this book considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling. By using poetic rewritings of The Tempest as its focus, this book broaches questions about fictional belief, morality, and the dynamics between readers, writers, and fictional characters. The book challenges ... More

What happens when we engage with fictional characters? What sort of cognitive activity and affective response does reading about imaginary figures involve? How do our imaginative engagements bear on our actions in the wider world? Moving between literary and philosophical analysis, this book considers the ways in which readers feel when they read, and how they understand ideas of feeling. By using poetic rewritings of The Tempest as its focus, this book broaches questions about fictional belief, morality, and the dynamics between readers, writers, and fictional characters. The book challenges conventionally accepted ideas of literary identification. It questions whether this activity is necessarily central to our reading practices, and scrutinises why identification has been seen as so important to some liberal humanist theories of literary engagement. Individual chapters on Robert Browning, W. H. Auden, and Samuel Beckett, who all drew on Shakespeare's late play, offer new readings of some major works, while the book's epilogue tackles questions of contemporary sympathy.