The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories pdf

Keith Oatley is a cognitive psychologist and novelist. His research is on the psychology of emotions and the psychology of fiction. He is the author of seven books of psychology, that have included Such stuff as dreams: The psychology of fiction (Wiley). Among his recent books is The Passionate Muse: Exploring emotion in stories (Oxford University Press) an original novella with psychological commentaries. The first of Keith’s novels, The Case of Emily V. (Secker and Warburg), won a Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. His most recent novel is Therefore Choose (Goose Lane Publications). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories pdf by Keith Oatley

The emotions a character feels--Hamlet's vengefulness when he realizes his uncle has killed his father, Anna Karenina's despair when she feels she can longer sustain her life, Marcel's joy when he tastes a piece of madeleine cake--are vital aspects of the experience of fiction. As Keith Oatley points out, it's not just the emotions of literary characters such as these in which we are interested. If we didn't ourselves experience emotions, we wouldn't go to the play, or watch the film, or read the book. In The Passionate Muse, Oatley, who is both a prize-winning novelist and a distinguished research psychologist, offers a hybrid book that alternates sections of an original short story, "One Another," with chapters that illuminate the psychology of emotion and fiction. Oatley not only provides insight into how people engage in stories, he also illuminates the value of emotion and the importance of stories for our psychological well-being. Indeed, he offers evidence that the more fiction we read, the better is our understandings of others. Through fiction, we come to know more about the emotions of others and ourselves.