What does literature know Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it onlyinterrupt and question other forms of knowledge This book seeks to answer andto p... » 

What does literature know Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it onlyinterrupt and question other forms of knowledge This book seeks to answer andto prolong these questions through the close examination of individual worksand the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry JamesKafka and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with widerranginginquiries into forms of irony indirection and the uses of fiction withexamples ranging from Auden to Proust and Rilke and from Calvino to Jean Rhysand Yeats. Literature is a form of pretence. But every pretence could tilt usinto the real and many of them do. There is no safe place for the reader noliteralists haven where fact is always fact and no paradise of metaphorwhere our poems plays and novels have no truck at all with the harsh andshifting world. «