Dreaming by the Book

"DREAMING BY THE BOOK is a startling inquiry into the ways novelists and poets mobilize the reader's imagination....In Scarry's account the mind's eye has five innate capacities that knowing writers enlist when they enlist our collaboration in creating and manipulating images. To these capacities correspond five techniques for which she has coined memorable names: radiant ignition; rarity; dyadic addition and subtraction; stretching, folding, and tilting; and floral supposition. These terms take on precise meaning as she illustrates them with examples from Homer, Flaubert, Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, Seamus Heaney, and other writers....Through diverse literary examples, introspection and recent findings in cognitive psychology, Scarry deploys a truly revealing phenomenology of imagination. For all its eccentricity...DREAMING BY THE BOOK will affect how one reads fiction and poetry as few critical works have done before."Scarry, Elaine is the author of 'Dreaming by the Book', published 2001 under ISBN 9780691070766 and ISBN 0691070768.