Ler ficção pode nos aperfeiçoar moralmente?

The genre I think about most, the realist novel, developed special methods to allow the reader to experience what it is like to be someone else. When one reads a great novel, one enters directly into the experience of other individuals. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, who regarded sympathy for others as a universal human trait and essential to morality, pointed out that we are barred from ever experiencing the thought and feelings of another person. We can only infer them. Some fifty years later, Jane Austen invented a technique for allowing us to enter into the process of another person’s thoughts, and in so doing she in effect invented the realist psychological novel.