What happens when we read novels and how do we make sense of them? Inge Wimmers explores these questions by developing a flexible poetics of reading that generously opens up the interpretive space between reader and text, while drawing on current theories of reading and combining rhetorical, pragmatic, and phenomenological approaches. "Poetics," here, is extended beyond the study of purely textual features to structures of exchange between text and reader. In a discussion of four major French novels from the seventeenth century to the present, the author not only sets up a broad-based...