This book defends the value of literary reading by focusing on the knowledge and experiences literature affords. It begins with a close analysis of the sense of intimacy involved in literary reading. The book’s principal perspective, however, is cognitive. It gives a thorough overview of the different ways in which the cognitive content of literature has been conceived in contemporary aesthetics and develops a novel view of the idea of experiential knowledge according to which literary works give knowledge of what it is like to undergo a particular experience. The book furthermore argues that literature should be taken as a serious epistemic medium, because authors’ creative work can embody significant epistemic virtues. Particular value is attributed to habitual literary reading, and the book examines the status of this type of reading in the pressure of the digitalising world. The book’s main claim is that the so-called crisis of reading may very well be a crisis of experience, knowledge and understanding as well.

This book is included in DOAB.