This thesis explores the roles of widowhood and sympathy in Henry James's short and long fiction. By the time James established himself as a writer of fiction, the culture of sentiment and its formation of sympathetic identification had become central to American and British writers. Critically, however, sympathy in James's fiction has been overlooked because he chose to write about rich expatriates and European nobility. James's pervasive use of widowed characters in his fiction suggests the he too participated in the same aesthetic agenda as William Dean Howells and George Eliot to evoke sympathy in their readers as a means of promoting class unity. In this thesis I show how James's use of widowed characters places him in the same sympathetic tradition as Howells and Eliot not by eliciting sympathy for themselves, but, rather, by awakening a sympathetic response from his readers for his protagonists seeking love. In chapter one I explore why James may have used so many widowed characters in his fiction. I cite the death of his cousin Minny Temple as a defining moment in his literary career and argue that he may have experienced an "emotional widowhood" after her early death. I also discuss the role of widows in his short fiction, which I suggest, is different from the role of widows in his novels. This chapter is biographical, yet provides important background for understanding why, more than any other author, James's fiction is replete with widowed characters. Chapter two explains the culture of sentiment of which James has been excluded. It explores the theories of David Hume and Adam Smith and their influence on the aesthetic principles defining Howells and Eliot's work. In this chapter I contend that James is indeed part of this sentimental tradition despite his renunciation of sentiment in his fiction because he tried to promote sympathy among his readers through his widowed characters. In chapter three I do close readings of The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902) and argue that these two texts best represent James's attempt at sympathetic writing.

Bakom Rubrikerna (Behind the headlines) is a project that uses visual communication and the idea of negative space to critique Swedish media, politicians, and the discourse regarding refugees with different backgrounds (cultural, geographical, socioeconomical, religious, political) and ethnicities. It explores the concept of selective sympathy and what role media, especially newsprints, have in recreating harmful narratives around certain refugees. The project aims to give the reader a deeper understanding of the harmful Eurocentric and xenophobic views that influence refugee politics and media’s coverage of the two different refugee (human) crises, in 2015 and today, in 2022.

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<p>This dissertation explores the connections between sympathy, gender, and characterization in four novels by George Eliot. It contributes to studies of George Eliot’s work by offering readings of minor characters in <em>Adam Bede</em>, <em>The Mill on the Floss</em>, <em>Middlemarch</em>, and <em>Daniel Deronda</em>. Focusing on these characters, who have tended to be ignored in critical studies of the novels, this dissertation argues for a re-evaluation of the relationship between gender and sympathy as understood by George Eliot. Taking into consideration a number of characters who exhibit a range of gendered behaviours and identities, this study explores how both normative and non-normative expressions of masculinity and femininity inform individuals’ sympathy. It uses the concepts of sympathetic economies and sympathetic ethics to demarcate the tension between realism and idealism in George Eliot’s representations of sympathy. The goal of this dissertation is to begin to map out some of the ways in which careful attention to peripheral characters can enhance readings of sympathetic ethics and economies in George Eliot by showing the subtle and challenging ways in which sympathy inflects, and is in turn inflected by, discourses about femininity and masculinity.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

In 1846 and 1847, ether and chloroform were used and celebrated for the first time in Britain and the United States as effective surgical anaesthetics capable of rendering individuals insensible to physical pain. During the same decade, British novels of realism were enjoying increasing cultural authority, dominating readers' attention, and evoking readers' sympathy for numerous social justice issues. This dissertation investigates a previously unanswered question in studies of literature and medicine: how did writers of social realism incorporate realistic descriptions of physical pain, a notoriously difficult sensation to describe, in an era when the very idea of pain's inevitability was challenged by medical developments and when, concurrently, novelists, journalists, and politicians were concerned with humanitarian reforms to recognize traditionally ignored and disadvantaged individuals and groups in pain? By contextualizing the emergence of specific realist novels including works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, William Howard Russell, and Charles Dickens, within larger nonfiction discourses regarding factory reform, prison reform, and war, this dissertation identifies and clarifies how realist authors, who aim to demonstrate general truths about "real life," employed various descriptions of physical pain during this watershed moment in medicine and pain theory, to convince readers of their validity as well as to awaken sympathetic politics among readers. This study analyzes Gaskell's first industrial novel, Mary Barton (1848), Reade's prison-scandal novel, It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), Russell's Crimean War correspondence (1850s) and only novel, The Adventures of Doctor Brady (1868), and Dickens's second Bildungsroman, Great Expectations (1861), thereby revealing different strategies utilized by each author representing pain - ranging from subtle to graphic, collective to individualized, urgent to remembered, and destructive to productive. This study shows how audience expectations, political timing, authorial authority, and medical theory influence and are influenced by realist authors writing pain, as they contribute to a cultural consensus that the pain of others is unacceptable and requires attention. These realist authors must, in the end, provide fictionalized accounts of pain, asking readers to act as witnesses and to use their imaginations, in order to inspire sympathy. / English

This study examines the practical and political implications of sympathy as a mode of achieving the intercommunicative relationship between the self and the other, emphasizing the significance of subjective agency not simply guided by the imperative category of morality but mainly enacted by a hybrid of discourses through the interaction between the two entities. Scenes of Clerical Life, Eliot's first fictional narrative on illuminating the intertwining relation of religion to secular conditions of life, reveals that the essence of religion is the practice of love between the self and the other derived from sympathy and invoked by their dialogic discourses of confession which enable them to foster the communality, on the grounds that the alterity implicated in the narrative of the other summons and re-historicizes the narrative of the subject's traumatic event in the past. Romola, Eliot's historical novel, highlights the performativity of subject which, on the one hand, locates Romola outside the social frame of domination and appropriation as a way of challenging the universalizing discourses of morality and duty sanctioned by the patriarchal ideology of norms, religion, and marriage. On the other hand, the heroine re-engages herself inside the social structure as a response to other's need for help by substantiating her compassion for others in action. Felix Holt, the Radical, Eliot's political and industrial novel, investigates the limits of moral discourse and instrumental reason. Esther employs her strategy of hybridizing her aesthetic and moral tastes in order to debilitate masculine desires for moral inculcation and material calculation. Esther reinvigorates her subjectivity by simultaneously internalizing and externalizing a hybrid of tastes. In effect, the empowerment of her subjectivity is designed not only to provide others with substantial help from the promptings of her sympathy for them, but also to fulfill her romantic plot of marriage.

Analytic ethics often neglects the exploration and appreciation of morality as it is actually practised on a day-to-day basis. But by looking at how, in a practical sense, we are able to interact with others in a morally appropriate way we can construct a compelling picture of what some of our most pervasive obligations are. This thesis takes such an approach through the concept of understanding – understanding essentially taken here to involve those processes involved in detecting and correctly responding to beings typically possessing inherent moral significance. In the first two chapters ‘understanding' and the understanding approach are themselves explicated, and placed in the context of several other related approaches in the English-speaking tradition – Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, Nel Noddings' ethics of care and Richard Hare's preference utilitarianism. This approach is then used to provide us with an alternative idea about what our moral reasoning suggests to be of fundamental ethical significance, and of what kinds of activity morality recommends to us. The activity explored in most detail here is that of engaging with fiction – or more broadly, fictive imaginings. While understanding shows us that fictional characters and events themselves cannot have an inherent moral valence or significance, it also shows us when and how it is possible and appropriate to ethically assess fictive engagement, be it as creator or consumer. This is seen after exploring how and in what ways our moral understanding can be appropriately applied to and exercised by fictions at all, and why fiction should be of particular interest to the understanding agent, looking at the work of Martha Nussbaum, Jenefer Robinson, Peter Lamarque and others on aesthetic cognitivism. Ultimately this leads us to discern a minimal ethical constraint on our interpretation of fiction and art in general, further proving understanding's usefulness.

This dissertation argues that music is always ideological. For this thesis two lines of argument are given. The first states that music is always ideological because it requires verbal discourses about itself. The second line of argument states that music is always ideological because it influences the listener affectively. That language is necessary for talk about music is trivial. The point is rather that talk about music is necessary for auditive behaviour to turn into complex cultural artefacts. Without language humans would have no more music than birds, whales or duetting apes. At the other extreme, musical experiences are affective in nature. To have a musical experience is to experience an affective unfolding through time. Affect (as distinguished from the emotions) refers to the amodal properties of perception-such as intensity, shape, rhythm-and lies at the heart of human communication. With its roots in early mother-infant interaction, affective communication is inherently social. Together with discourses about music, the affective properties of musical experiences makes music into an extremely subtle, and thereby efficient, ideological manipulator in various types of social contexts. Finally, the theoretical conclusions reached will be exemplified by introducing a virtual listener, the various facets of whose listening experiences are captured by different analytical methods and listening reports as applied to some of the "serious" music by Frank Zappa. Central for the explanation of these listening experiences are the "passions," that is, the affects, moods and emotions that the music evokes in the listener, or that the listener takes the music to express. / <p>The attached fulltext is a revised version of the original thesis.</p>

La sympathie comme principe par lequel une idée se convertit en impression n’est pas la seule espèce de sympathie employée par David Hume dans ses ouvrages. Le terme «sympathie» possédait des sens variés dans le langage courant au XVIIIème siècle, et il arrive que le philosophe écossais se serve du terme «sympathie» dans l’un ou l’autre de ces sens. C’est ainsi que, outre son concept philosophique, Hume se sert du terme «sympathie» suivant cinq autres sens. L’identification des différentes sortes de sympathie présentes dans les ouvrages de Hume a permis de mieux comprendre ce qu’il en était de la nature de son concept philosophique de sympathie. Ainsi, on a pu comprendre quels rapports la sympathie entretenait avec un autre principe de production d’affections mentionné à l’occasion par Hume : la contagion. Ainsi, on a également pu comprendre quels rapports la sympathie entretenait avec d’autres éléments de la philosophie humienne, tels que les esprits animaux, leurs mouvements et les émotions. Les analyses ont démontré, par ailleurs, que les esprits animaux et leurs mouvements jouaient un rôle de premier plan dans la théorie humienne des passions et que le principe de la sympathie, au final, désignait l’augmentation de l’agitation des esprits animaux. C’est ainsi que la sympathie entendue comme principe par lequel une idée était convertie en impression désignait un mécanisme physiologique chez Hume. Les analyses ont également démontré que les impressions que Hume nommait «émotions» désignaient plus particulièrement le mouvement des esprits animaux. Qu’ainsi, l’on devait considérer qu’il y avait dans la taxonomie du philosophe écossais non seulement des perceptions de l’entendement humain (idées, passions, sentiments, etc.) mais également des perceptions du corps humain (émotions) et que celles-ci étaient en correspondance étroite avec celles-là. On peut ainsi faire l’hypothèse qu’il y a dans la philosophie humienne des éléments susceptibles de fonder une théorie de l’union entre l’âme et le corps. La considération de la sympathie comme un principe physiologique d’agitation des esprits animaux permet que l’on jette un regard nouveau sur la façon dont David Hume concevait la nature humaine. / Sympathy, as a principle by which an idea is converted into an impression, is not the only kind of sympathy that David Hume employs in his works. Hume refers to several of the multiple distinct meanings that the term afforded in 18th century vernacular. The thesis argue that in the end the Scottish philosopher uses the word “sympathy” with five different meanings, besides his own philosophical concept. Identifying these meanings as they appear throughout Hume’s body of work provided a greater understanding of the nature of his own philosophical concept of sympathy. This brought to light the relationship between sympathy and another affection-producing principle that Hume occasionally mentions: contagion. Similarly, this granted insight into the interplay between sympathy and other elements in Hume’s philosophy, especially the animal spirits, their movements, and emotions. Indeed, this analysis has uncovered the key role that animal spirits and their movements play in Hume’s theory of passions, observing that his principle of sympathy merely describes an increase in the agitation of animal spirits. Consequently, sympathy as a principle of conversion of an idea into an impression describes what is in fact in Hume’s thinking a physiological mechanism. Further, this investigation has shown that those impressions which Hume calls “emotions” specifically refer to the movement of animal spirits. Therefore, we must recognize that Hume’s taxonomy not only includes perceptions in human understanding (ideas, passions, sentiments, etc.), but also integrates perceptions in the human body (emotions), and that they are closely correlated. This leads to the hypothesis that there are in Hume’s philosophical works enough elements to delineate a theory of the relationship between body and mind (or soul). Understanding sympathy as a physiological mechanism involving the agitation of animal spirits offers a new outlook on David Hume's conception of human nature.

As an academic working in the field of applied theatre with undergraduate students, I became increasingly interested in how their skills, techniques, knowledge and understanding are developed to work in applied theatre settings, particularly those that were unfamiliar to them. I was particularly interested in investigating how important, if at all, are the concepts of empathy and sympathy in the preparation of students to work in applied theatre settings and with different client groups. Research of relevant literature revealed pedagogical parallels with social work, particularly in relation to the client-facilitator relationship. There appeared to be synergy between the work undertaken in applied theatre settings and in social work. The interdisciplinary nature of this research contributes to new professional knowledge and practice. A qualitative case study was undertaken, adopting a constructivist and interpretative approach, to understand the way meanings of empathy and sympathy were constructed and interpreted by the students when working in applied theatre settings. The research took place as part of normal professional practice and consisted of a questionnaire (n=14), two semi-structured interviews (n=4) and a focus group (n=4) with third year students studying a BA(Hons) Drama in the Community degree at a small UK Higher Education Institute (HEI). The findings indicated that the participants found it difficult to define, or describe, the concepts of empathy and sympathy with any clarity. They also found it difficult to distinguish between the concepts. However, there was a consensus of opinion that the ability to distinguish between them was important because of the client-facilitator relationship when working in applied theatre settings. The data highlighted that the concepts had only been taught or considered on the programme of study in an implicit way. From this, I concluded that teaching the students the concepts in a more explicit way would help develop their knowledge and understanding of those concepts, thus enabling them to become more informed applied theatre graduates.