Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading

Book excerpt: 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.