Once-Told Tales: An Essay in Literary Aesthetics

Human beings are captivated by stories. In the modern world we consume fiction as literature, at a huge rate—but what is at the heart of the experience of the novel, of silent reading?

Philosophers of art have traditionally focused on a reading experience in which novels are read, re-read, savored, and studied in depth. In this book, Peter Kivy looks at the more common experience of a reader who reads a novel just once, or who, if he does read it again, does so for the same reason that he read it the first time: to be told a story. This is not the reading experience of the scholar or critic but that of the average reader, and it represents an engagement with the age-old experience of story-telling that is bound up with the very beginnings of humanity.

Drawing comparisons with other art forms, this book examines the role of aesthetic features, such as narrative structure, in silent reading, and pursues the experiential core of what it is to read a novel: a tale once told.