Dreaming by the Book

A pathbreaking work about the way literature teaches us to use our imagination.

We often attribute to our imaginative life powers that go beyond ordinary perception or sensation. In Dreaming by the Book, the noted scholar Elaine Scarry explores the apparently miraculous but in fact understandable processes by which poets and writers confer those powers on us: how they teach us the work of imaginative creation.

Writers from Homer to Heaney, Scarry argues, instruct us in the art of mental com...