Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading: Textual Dangers

By Kevin R West and Kevin R. West

Literary Depictions 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1498563716
• ISBN13: 9781498563710
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"