Brigid Lowe’s Home Page
I’m a research fellow at Trinity College Cambridge – my research so far has been mainly about Victorian Fiction and what makes it so great. My first book has just been published.
I’m married to Sean Crawford – he does philosophy. We have a daughter named Ide – she toddles. My dad, Fergus Lowe, is a professor of psychology, as is my father-in-law, Charles Crawford. My sister, Catrin Lowe, is currently assistant director of Fin Kennedy’s How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found at Sheffield Theatres. My mother, Pat Sheehy, is the most erudite woman in the country.
I’m particularly interested in these lovely topics:
Theory of fiction, the Victorians (particularly G. Eliot, G.H. Lewes and Dickens), description and detail in imaginative writing, artistic representations of motherhood and the family, the depiction of work in fiction, the depiction of nature in fiction, human nature, David Hume, sympathy and empathy, cognitive approaches to literature, Marx, rennaisance painting, sculpture and architecture, political theory and practice (especially individualism and feminism)
Shirley Loew said,
March 18, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Hello Brigid,
I am an MA student of comparative literature.
I plan to write my thesis on sympathy towards anti-heroes in the novels of Elsa Morante (Italian writer of the twentieth century).
I’ve just started reading your book, hoping it will be relevant to my research.
I’m confused from the distinction between sympathy and empathy as stated in page 9.
“…’empathy’ comprehending feeling with another person from their point of view, the feeling of their feelings, and ‘sympathy’ indicating a feeling for them from a distinct, outside, or at least still separate, perspective.”
Could it be that the terms ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy’ were exchanged in this sentence?
Thank you
Shirley
Brigid Lowe said,
March 18, 2008 at 5:53 pm
HI Shirley
The sentence you quote expresses not my working definition of sympathy, but a distinction that has been common in 20 and 21st century discussions of sympathy/empathy. As I say in the book, this kind of distinction is anachronistic when read into literature of the past, as the word ‘empathy’ has only quite recently become current, taking over part of what ’sympathy’ used to mean. In my book, I use sympathy to mean ‘feeling with’, and so do the Victorian writers I talk about.
Brigid