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quick emotional responses various narrative or dramatic junctures. But with works of art, emotion characteristically does not just break out, say, halfway through narrative, even though swings and swells in emotion will be felt at many points in a story (as in a piece of music). Emotional feeling is normally coextensive with the experience of a work of art. Stated another way, fictions do not provide narrative content, then add emotion: they tend rather to establish a tone, mood, or feeling immediately and make continuous such moments might well be emotional peaks. But works of art emotionally saturated in the sense that they express and explore affective experience within a coherent range throughout their totality. If think, for instance, of any Chekhov play, the sense of an emotional world will be established almost immediately in the opening scene. The same can be said for much poetry and nearly all music: emotion is added to the narrative or developmental structure of the work but mood that imbues the whole.

It is worth remarking that emotional saturation in this sense seems to been readily understood and accepted by audiences for art everywhere; as I have been able to ascertain, it is as much a spontaneous feature cross-culturally as mimesis or the admiration of skill. Indian aesthetics uses the Sanskrit word rasa to describe the specific emotional “flavor” a work of art, and I have certainly seen the very marked emotional tones achieved in the sing-sing dance perperformances of New Guinea. This ready accep tance of emotion as coextensive with art, intrinsic to appears to be a bedrock fact of human nature and the nature of art; could in principle have been otherwise, but it is not. For example, audiences worldwide find it natural and fitting that movies have musical scores to underline or interpret the emotions implicit in the story; even earliest silent films were given musical accompaniment. I doubt there exists a people anywhere that would find musical soundtracks movies a strange or pointless practice; everyone immediately understands the presence of music in film. The naturalness of music for films goes along with the idea of opera but is just as well represented by love songs from the troubadours through Schubert to the Beatles to the present day. Finally, that it makes sense to fuse narrative and music to emotion can be demonstrated by the fact that some of the most disconcerting aesthetic experiences involve situations where the emotional expression of different aspects of a work are at cross-purposes anyone who doubts this should try reading Emily Dickinson with Beethoven on in the background).

Fiction provides us, then, with templates, mental maps for emotional These maps, Carroll argues, must be “emotionally saturated, imaginatively vivid.” Art, therefore, is at least in this respect an adaptation control of their emotions rather than being controlled by them. As Carroll puts it, “Evidence for this can be derived from every cultural corner the earth, for the way literature and preliterate storytelling enters into total motivational life of individuals, shaping and directing their belief systems and their behavior.”

Although he does not refer to Aristotle or to the psychological on children’s imaginative play, Carroll does remind us of Dickens’s persistent attention to the role that pretend play, or its unnatural absence, has in the lives of abused and neglected children. Tom Louisa Gradgrind in Hard Times are tragically deprived of art and literature by their father, a utilitarian ideologue, and are left emotionally morally stunted. Esther Summerson, the protagonist of Bleak House, grows up in a world without affection. She survives by creating imaginative world of her own. It is a private, imaginary place where talks with her doll and creates normal human affection, keeping emotional nature alive, till the plot turns in her favor and she moves better environment: “The conversations she has with her doll are fantasies of pleasure; they are desperate and effective measures of salvation.” Carroll also mentions