Art and Emotion

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1 Introduction
2 The Emotions
3 'Fearing Fictions'
4 Engaging Fictions
5 Causal Stories
6 Expression and Metaphor
7 The Cognitive Theory
8 Defending the Arousal Theory
9 The Musical Experience
10 Belief and Experience
11 Creation and Criticism
Bibliography, Index

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Derek Matravers examines how emotions form a bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; and we may experience emotions towards, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. These experiences are philosophically puzzling, for their causes seem quite different from the causes of emotion in the rest of our lives. Matravers shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. He carries out a critical survey of various accounts of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defence of a controversial view about musical expression: that music expresses the emotions it causes its listeners to feel.

Reviews

it is refreshing to find a philosopher writing on aesthetics extensively illustrating his arguments with our experience of music in a field usually dominated by the visual arts ... This is a complex book, but it is also an important and convincing one and should be read by anyone interested in the relation between art and the emotions

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