Includes bibliographical references and index.

Why do readers claim that fictional worlds feel real even when they know they're not? How can certain literary characters seem capable of leading lives of their own, outside the stories in which they appear? What is uniquely pleasurable about the experience of reading a novel and what do readers lose when this experience comes to an end? These questions are central to literary experience but remain difficult for readers, critics, and philosophers to explain. When Fiction Feels Real introduces a new set of tools for thinking about the phenomenology of reading by bringing narrative techniques into conversation with well-established psychological research on reading and cognition. Through sensitive attention to classic novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, as well as to the elegies of Thomas Hardy, Elaine Auyoung reveals what nineteenth-century writers know about what happens when we read. This book changes the way we think about literary language, realist aesthetics, and what readers bring to a text, opening up a new field of inquiry centered on the intricate relationship between fictional representation and comprehension.