Routledge Studies in Cultural History Enlightenment and Political Fiction: The Everyday Intellectual, (Hardcover)

This book maintains that it was not passive reception but active participation of readers-including those who listened to fiction read out loud-that fostered the Enlightenment. The decision to engage in intellectual debates, grounded in ideas often first found in fiction, allowed everyday people to participate in the questioning, and eventually the decision-making, of their own states.