...Mark Bracher Drawing on empirical studies, the article argues that developing moral character and advancing social justice through literary study is both eminently feasible and profoundly ethical, and that claims to the contrary are based on faulty notions of the psychological bases of morality...

... structure event memory and co-construct the narratives that children use for self and moral identities. The bioemotional landscape formed by experience influences the narratives that shape the life course. Initially, this occurs nonverbally through touch and emotional response; later, it occurs through...

...Patrick Colm Hogan Some recent writers on ethics, prominently Jonathan Haidt, have seen emotion and narrative as central to moral judgment and behavior. However, much of this work is not clear about the precise nature of emotion and narrative or the relation of the two to each other and to ethics...

... of literary works. This is followed by a study of early contributions to the public controversy over The Satanic Verses , in which Lena Jayyusi's analysis of moral action descriptions is used to draw attention to commentators' ideological attempts to structure this novel as a speech-like action carried out...

... the assumptions, method, and terminology he inherited from the vigorous associationist tradition in eighteenth-century British philosophy and psychology, Shelley sought to demonstrate the innate and thus indefeasible foundations of human morality, especially its master principle of social equity. His analysis...

...Paul McCormick Self-conscious character narration provides special opportunities for authors to signal (un)reliability. This article focuses on one such opportunity. When narrators like John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier consistently assert moral and cognitive distance from...

...Blakey Vermeule In an important book of evolutionary literary theory, William Flesch argues that we tell stories to exercise our sense of moral outrage. In this essay I try to spell out some of the consequences of his view. First I give an overview of his argument. Then I revisit a major work...

... strategic empathy for feeling humanity in an indifferent, Godless universe. Hardy's work demonstrates engagement with a variety of empathetic narrative strategies outlined in my Empathy and the Novel (2007), from the fellow-feeling of eighteenth-century moral sentimentalism, to the role-taking imagining...

... into an otherwise realistic setting and allow the spectator to fully enjoy the main characters’ vigilante revenge. The theory of fictional reliefs posited here holds that this mixture of modes facilitates one of two paths to moral judgment. References Arvas Paula Nestingen Andrew 2011...

... to relate large parts of the story through the consciousness of teenagers allows for highly emotional perspectives that have the potential to engage readers in the social and moral issues around resource extraction. References Albrecht Glenn . 2005 . “ ‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health...

... depicting lovers’ quarrels and morally flawed characters may paradoxically strike audiences as more authentically romantic because they dramatize an aspect of attachment emotions’ functioning recently elucidated by cognitive science, namely, that of “body budgeting” (allocation of energy resources...

... “characters” who effortlessly embody socially shared values. The hierarchical structures of these societies also place a greater premium on theory of mind for subordinates than for the powerful, hence attaching a tinge of opprobrium to its exercise. In literature this translates into the moral ambivalence...

... paradigm for the critical examination of storytelling cultures. It concludes by envisioning future forms of public critical engagement for narrative theorists. Popular notions of narrative tend to celebrate the cognitive and moral benefits of storytelling while downplaying the limits of narrative...

.... This politically charged landscape for the telling of personal narrative (and the speed and ease with which stories circulate via mass media) creates unique challenges for veterans, who need to find meaning in their experiences for their own sakes, but resist the ready-made plots and morals imposed on them...

...Joshua Landy While it is often assumed that fictions must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit to us, certain texts defy this assumption by functioning as training grounds for the capacities : in engaging with them, we stand to become not more knowledgeable or more...

... by social forces, but New Historicism equally argues that a sense of autonomous self is often encoded within documents based on the discourse of power. Among such documents is the emblem, a conjunction of several texts and one image delivering a moral lesson. Using the theoretical framework of New...

...Angus Fletcher Against the idea that there is one true form of tragedy that can anchor a universal human ethics, Darwinism suggests that life is filled with endless kinds of tragic circumstance. But even as this biological view of tragedy spells the end of moral idealism, it opens up an inclusive...

...” and “moral” emotions (as differentiated by the clinical psychologists Bunmi O. Olatunji and Jorge Moll). The article analyzes how these embodied prompts activate readers' preconscious modes of perception, modify cognitive skills, and intensify the effects of reading by anchoring ideational content in readers...

.... Applying the revised theory, the essay characterizes contrasts between Edmund Burke's and Thomas Paine's thought at all levels of framing. It shows how their lexical frames for “revolution” diverge as their main arguments craft opposing issue-defining frames for the central moral issue of revolution versus...

... of England , and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. In particular, it examines the behavior of crowds as a whole, individuals (especially leaders), and subgroups in terms of the key notions of agency, moral responsibility, organization, and action. Finally, it places this debate within the context...