What Literature Does: A Narrative Review of the Social and Psychological Functions of Literature, from Catharsis to Theory of Mind
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Literature's functions are the oldest and newest of literary theory's questions: what does the poem do to its hearer, the novel to its reader, the story to its society? This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that question. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the classical charter, in which Aristotle's catharsis, Horace's dulce et utile, Sidney's golden world, and Shelley's unacknowledged legislators defined poetry's moral and civic offices; the reader's turn, in which Iser's act of reading, Jauss's horizon of expectations, Felski's uses, and Eagleton's materialist audit relocated the function from the text to the reader and the institution; and the psychological and social evidence, in which Bettelheim's enchantment, Nussbaum's poetic justice, Green and Brock's transportation, and Kidd and Castano's theory-of-mind experiments measured what the tradition had claimed. It is concluded that the functions of literature form a continuous argument from catharsis to cognition: literature pleases, teaches, integrates, and exercises the social mind---claims old in rhetoric, new in evidence, and permanently contested between the canon's advocates and the skeptics of its uses.
Authors: Revista, Zen, LITERATURE, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204773331