Relationships of sympathy

With its emphasis on the Self entering into the mental and emotional experience of the Other, sympathy came to be regarded in the Romantic period as the source of artistic capacity, aesthetic insight and interpersonal understanding. Reasserting the importance of applying Romantic critical tenets to Romantic texts, this book argues that understanding and emotion should have a vital place in present-day thinking about Romantic literature.

This study explores the ways in which sympathy makes possible both self-expressive writing and the psychological hermeneutic such writing generates. The author analyses in detail diverse examples of the lyric, the diary, the letter and the autobiography, arguing that these genres in which the writer was assumed to be freely expressing himself most closely duplicate and enact the psychology of human relationships.

These readings are based in Romantic literary and hermeneutic conventions and evaluated through the lens of twentieth-century psychological principles. The book will have a broad appeal to scholars of the Romantic period and students of genre and aesthetic theory, hermeneutics and literary criticism.