Negative Empathy in Literature and the Arts

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