Literature and the Taste of Knowledge

What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This book seeks to answer and to prolong these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction, with examples ranging from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats. Literature is a form of pretence. But every pretence could tilt us into the real, and many of them do. There is no safe place for the reader: no literalist’s haven where fact is always fact; and no paradise of metaphor, where our poems, plays and novels have no truck at all with the harsh and shifting world.

• New readings of classic texts by authors including Henry James, Proust, Franz Kafka and Jean Rhys • Combination of close reading with theoretical speculation • New understandings of the role of ambiguity and irony in literature

Introduction: among the analogies; 1. What Henry knew; 2. After such knowledge; 3. Kafka and the Third Reich; 4. Seven types of obliquity; 5. Missing dates; 6. The fictionable world; Epilogue: The essays of our life.

\'Wood maintains his easy conversational tone while thinking deeply about some of the puzzling ways in which what we inadequately call \'form\' enables literature to impart what we inadequately call \'knowledge\'.\' Times Literary Supplement

\' … a brilliantly eloquent account of what books know that their authors might not.\' Observer