The Art of Pity

The connection between reading literature and developing an ethical self

The late 16th and early 17th centuries in England were a time of substantial anxiety over the value of reading and writing literature. The Art of Pity argues that English early modern literature made a powerful case for the ability of literature to provide ethical instruction by engaging our emotions. Contemporary explanations of how literature could do so, however, were various and faltering. Writers like Sidney and Spenser insisted in their prose that poetry could, in Spenser’s words, “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” because of its aesthetic power. Yet their poetry demonstrated skepticism of the notion that aesthetic delight provided a vehicle for ethical instruction. Meanwhile, Shakespeare explored varying models of how drama affects its audience, grappling with the question of whether our emotional responses construct or merely reveal our ethical dispositions. These writers’ works embody the tensions of their historical moment, suspended between classical and Medieval philosophy and Enlightenment thought.

In this thoughtfully researched and beautifully written study, Danielle St. Hilaire argues that we can find frameworks for understanding the intersection of emotion, ethics, and literature that unite modern discourses of aesthetic autonomy with seemingly incompatible ethical theories that have largely fallen out of contemporary discussions regarding the value of literature.