Moral Emotions and Aesthetic Experience in Young Readers Exploring Challenges and Opportunities in Reading a Classic Hungarian Young Adult Novel

Abstract

The paper considers readers’ engagement, aesthetic appreciation, narrative understanding and their moral or social involvement in many senses as interrelated—not only in general literature, but also in literature for young people. It introduces first the theoretical background terminology, mainly drawn from cognitive psychology and poetics and then examines a Hungarian novel, focusing on the relation between the narrative strategies and readers’ social emotions and moral judgment during reading the text. The novel in question, Be Faithful Unto Death (1995)—originally Légy jó mindhalálig (1920) by Zsigmond Móricz—is regarded as a classic and seminal work of Hungarian literature which offers young readers opportunities to experience empathy, explore moral emotions, and engage in moral reasoning. However, it also poses challenges to these abilities, to the extent that it engenders a certain level of difficulty for novice readers to become fully absorbed in the act of reading. In connection with that we also have to ask if the affordance of the texts correlates with the understanding competences and aesthetic preferences of their target audience - with reference to empirical (neuro)cognitive research.