Engaging Characters

Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there hasbeen remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives.In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close tocharacters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature offictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience.In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.

Review from previous edition A very detailed and well-informed survey of terrain of a sort that the more squarely philosophical contributions to the discussion have by and large ignored...Smith is very good., Welcome and important book ... considerable value of this book ... It develops an original, complex, articulated theory and fruitfully applies it to a wide variety of films ... an impressive work that in its lucidity and careful argumentation sets intellectual standards that most current film theory does not come even close to matching.

Murray Smith is Professor of Philosophy, Art, and Film at the University of Kent, co-director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at Kent, and Past President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. He has published widely on film, art and aesthetics. In addition to Engaging Characters, his publications include Film, Art, and the Third Culture (OUP); Trainspotting (BFI); Film Theory and Philosophy (co-edited withRichard Allen) (OUP); Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (co-edited with Steve Neale) (Routledge); and Thinking through Cinema (co-edited with Tom Wartenberg) (Blackwell).