Abstract Works of fiction are works of and for the imagination. Additionally, they very often provide opportunities for learning—for the acquisition of knowledge and of skills. And the learning they provide comes to us through our imaginative engagement with them. We learn from them in surprisingly effective ways, and what we learn is often the sort of thing we can hardly ever learn in other ways. So it is said. This book defends the connection between fiction and imagination; it responds to a number of challenges to that idea, and argues that there lies within the domain of the imagination a number of not well-recognized capacities that make that connection work. The book is less enthusiastic about the connection between fiction and learning. The connection is surely one that exists, but it is easy to exaggerate it, to ignore countervailing tendencies to create error and ignorance, and to suppose that claims about learning from fiction require no serious empirical support. The book makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction: it suggests that a lot of what we take to be learning in this area is itself a kind of pretence, that we are too optimistic about the psychological and moral insights of authors, that works of fiction bear little resemblance to the celebrated thought experiments of the sciences, that the case for fiction as a Darwinian adaptation is weak, and that empathy is both hard to acquire from fiction and not always morally advantageous.
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