This Work 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. Introduction: A Novel Approach To Reading -- Tolstoy's Embodied Reader: Grasping The Fictional World -- Enduring Minds In Austen: Becoming Familiar With Fictional Characters -- Organizing Things In Dickens: Comprehension And Narrative Form -- George Eliot's Promise Of More: How Realism Enchants The Everyday -- When Novels End: Hardy And The Liberty Of Literary Experience -- Conclusion: On Mimesis. Elaine Auyoung. Includes Index. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.