Cecilia Miller is Associate Professor of History and Tutor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University.

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.

Introduction 1. Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Rationality, and Forms of Government 2. Simplicissimus (1668, 1669), Religious Toleration, and Friendship 3. Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), Science, and Social Class 4. Candide (1759), Sexuality, and the Modern Individual 5. The Betrothed (1825-1827, 1840-1842), Revolution, and the Perfectibility of the Human Mind. Conclusion.