Dreaming by the Book

A startling inquiry ... a truly revealing phenomenology of imagination... Dreaming by the Book will affect how one reads fiction and poetry as few critical works have done before. -- Kenneth Baker, art critic San Francisco Chronicle [Scarry] is extremely ambitious, seeking nothing less than a theory of literary cognition... Her interest, which is really in aesthetic success, makes her an original. -- James Wood New Republic Her approach often recalls that of ... Descartes and Hume as she attempts to solve the riddle of how the mind works. Scarry is an original, interdisciplinary thinker. She writes like someone enraptured by both the natural world ... and by language. Publishers Weekly [Scarry] has written an appendix to Aristotle, perhaps best entitled De Imaginatione, though I wonder whether it fits better to the end of his De Anima, 'On the Soul,' or his Poetics. Virginia Quarterly Review