Book details

Book description

Drawing comparisons with other art forms, this book examines the role of aesthetic features in silent reading, such as narrative structure, and the core experience of reading a novel as a story rather than a scholarly exercise.

• Focuses on the experience of the art form known as the novel
• Uses the more common perspective of a reader who reads to be told a story, rather than for scholarly or critical analysis
• Draws comparisons with experience of the other arts, music in particular
• Explores the different effects of a range of narrative approaches

Peter Kivy is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics. He is author of The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius (2001), Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (2002), The Performance of Reading (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), Music, Language, and Cognition: And Other Essays in the Aesthetics of Music (2007), and Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music (2009), and editor of The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (Blackwell, 2004).