Feeling (Together) for Anna Karenina: Understanding the Social Dimension of Emotions in Fiction

Emotions are central to our engagements with fictional narratives and partly ground our evaluations of literary works. Nevertheless, the idea of reacting emotionally to a work of fiction raises problems that philosophers are still struggling to deal with. In this paper, we will focus on a subset of these problems, which concerns the psychological function of emotions in the context of reading fiction. The standard approach to this question assumes an internalist and individualist perspective, focusing on individual internal states. However, we argue that our emotional responses to fiction are deeply social, embedded in social practices and serving important social functions that are often neglected in the literature, which constrain and partly determine the emotionality of the reading experience. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to supplement the internalist perspective by exploring the social dimension of emotions in fiction. Our main argument is that the emotions we feel when reading literary works look both inward and outward. They help our embodied imaginative recreations of narrative worlds, but they also engage authors of fictional works and other readers who partake in this practice with us, which calls for a more social and externalist approach to understanding emotions in fiction.