Art and Emotion

Emotions very often form a bridge between our experience of art and of life. We frequently find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; we may even experience emotions towards, or on behalf of, a fictional character. These experiences are philosophically puzzling, for their causes seem quite different from the causes of emotion in the rest of our lives. Here, Derek 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 of feelings. He analyzes various accounts of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitive accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defense of a controversial view about musical expression: that music expresses the emotions it causes its listeners to feel.