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When Fiction Feels Real

This book explores questions that are central to literary experience but remain difficult for critics to explain, such as how novels can seem to transport readers to fictional worlds that feel real, why literary characters can come to seem like intimate friends, and what is uniquely pleasurable about reading fiction. By drawing on psychological research on reading and cognition, this book provides literary studies with a new set of tools for analyzing the relationship between narrative technique and the phenomenology of reading. Focusing on classic novels by Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, and on poems by Thomas Hardy, this study makes it possible to specify what is distinctive about realist aesthetics. It changes the way critics think about literary language, mimesis, and what readers bring to fictional texts, opening up a new field of inquiry centered on the relationship between representational technique and comprehension.