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.

Reviewers have compared Keith Oatley's pure, spare prose with that of A.S. Byatt and Umberto Eco. In Therefore Choose, his intimately rendered characters draw us into an intense quest for meaning in a world diving headlong into chaos. Oatley is the author of two highly acclaimed novels: The Case of Emily V., which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and A Natural History. Professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, Keith Oatley has long been fascinated with the way humans communicate ideas and emotions. His numerous publications on the subject include Emotions: A Brief History and Understanding Emotions.

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