Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading : Textual Dangers

This book explores how American and European books represent reading as a dangerous act. It studies works that stage depictions of reading in such a way that readers suffer actual harm from the magical or supernatural qualities of a given text. Such dangerous reading fascinates by exaggerating the dangers that inhabit real experiences of reading.

Literary Representations of Dangerous Reading explores how selected American and European literary texts, from the classic to the contemporary, represent reading as a dangerous endeavor. It investigates how the texts being read or the conditions of reading may produce danger and considers the various qualities of the dangers depicted: literal or metaphorical, real or imagined, minor or mortal. Whereas readers can readily imagine being depressed or bored by a book, or even perhaps corrupted in some moral fashion, readers typically assume that the mere words on a page cannot directly affect their health. Nevertheless, literature can and does stage readings in which readers suffer actual harm from the magical or supernatural qualities of a given text. Such impossibly dangerous reading fascinates, the author argues, by exaggerating the dangers that may inhabit certain real experiences of reading.