Murray Smith

Characters—those imaginary 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 attitudes, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection—indeed, the whole palette of human emotions. Often enough, powerfully drawn characters transcend the stories to which they owe their genesis, migrating into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that engage our minds and shape our feelings in equal measure. In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive theory of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. While focussing on film, Smith’s analysis also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new media, and social media. At the heart of Smith’s account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the different dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, 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 of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience as a whole. Opening with a Foreword by David Bordwell, in this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new Afterword reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and character inspired by the book.

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens. The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology–in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of interindividual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the patterns of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate. To generate this review, we (1) listed more than 70adaptivechallengeshumans faced in the course of their evolution, (2) identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, (3) specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism(i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and (4) linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.