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Reading classical fiction books is also education or only entertainment? – Academia Stack Exchange

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If you want to learn something about people – read a good psychology book,

I’m tempted to ask whether you ever read a psychology book that you learned as much from as from a literary classic. But I won’t.

If you want to understand people based on someone commenting on what they do and why, then by all means, go ahead and read a psychology book. If you want to understand people without subtitles – you know, as they act in everyday life – then crack open a novel by Jane Austen, read it and think about what the author describes.

if you want to learn something about an epoch – read a good history book.

Few history books can make people of a bygone era come to life the way an Aubrey & Maturin book can, or the way you can learn about Elizabethan England from Shakespeare. (Yes, secondary sources are helpful.)

Do not learn from fiction books, which often distort facts to make a book more impressive.

Quite correct, but there is in fact more to life than facts.

After all fiction books are not peer reviewed.

In fact, yes, they are. Anything you can call a “classic” has been peer reviewed, and by more than three bored grad students who vacillated between stopping a rival from publishing and getting him to quote their own paper.

is there an educational element in fiction books which can not be gained from non-fiction literature in a more efficient way?

Yes, there is. Non-fiction explains. Fiction shows. These are two different paths to understanding. You will learn more about life by using multiple ways to understand it, just like you will get more out of a historical piece of fiction if you also have an understanding of the epoch, its social conventions, its technology and so forth.


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