Introduction
This introduction argues that psychological research on reading and cognition can help literary critics understand the relationship between narrative technique and the phenomenology of reading fiction. It presents cognitive perspectives on fictionality and the comprehension process to show how nineteenth-century novelists render characters and scenes intimately knowable in spite of their fictional status. To explore the realist writer’s pursuit of verisimilar effects, we need to adopt a new form of critical attention, approaching the words of a novel not as bearers of interpretive meaning but as cues that prompt readers to retrieve their existing embodied knowledge, to rely on their social intelligence, and to exercise their capacities for learning.