Reader empathy, textual features and the novel

Most existing scholarship on reader empathy is either mostly theoretical (for example, Bourget, 2023; Keen, 2007), or uses short texts in empirical settings to gauge readers’ reactions (Fernandez-Quintanilla, 2020; Koopman, 2016; Van Peer and Pander Maat, 1996). This exploratory study used a reader survey in which respondents were asked to reflect on their emotional response to a novel which they had read in the course of their normal reading. The novels mentioned in the survey could thus be categorised into those which produced high degrees of empathy in readers and novels that did not. Through analysis of these novels, a number of textual features were identified which were more common in the higher empathy novels. These features include present tense narration, asynchrony, greater use of narrated perception, and a greater proportion of all categories of represented consciousness at the most emotional part of the story.