In case you wondered …

… Why Read Literature? | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Today, instead of Joseph Addison’s essays or Dr. Johnson’s lives of poets, we have hundreds of books like Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s—Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen(Chicago, 2012) or Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature (Lexington, 2012). I have not read either book, so I can’t say anything about the quality of argument in each, though I can say rather confidently that neither was written for the general public, nor are either likely to increase interest in these authors and texts.