How do we feel the suffering of others? Can we identify with this suffering? How has suffering been represented in literature (and other media)? Is it morally permissible to represent suffering, and find pleasure in its depiction? Does the representation of suffering have a cathartic effect on the audience? How have authors engaged with the psychology and aesthetics of suffering? In this course, we will examine these and related questions by discussing literary texts from the 17th to the 19th century. We will also draw on theoretical texts ranging from eighteenth-century empirical psychology to today's studies in the cognitive sciences. While the focus of the course is on materials from around 1800, we will engage with concepts that originate in both eighteenth-century and contemporary discourses. Students are encouraged to develop their own interests within the course's conceptual framework, and final projects that investigate materials from outside the course's specific time frame are possible.