What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This book answers and prolongs these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction. Examples range from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats.