Slowly, Mr Amazon is sending me a whole heap of books I ordered in the last month or two.  Yesterday I received The Implied Reader by Wolfgang Iser, Baltimore, John Hopkins Press, 1974.  Whether it will prove worth the expense remains to be seen, but a couple of the essays look promising.  Anyway, the introduction says this...

The history of the novel as a 'genre' began in the eighteenth centruy, at a time when people had become preoccupied with their own everyday lives.  Like no other art form before it, the novel was concerned directly with social and hisotrical norms that applied to a particular environment, and so established an immediate link with the empirical reality familiar with its readers.  While other ltierary forms induced the reader to contemplate the exemplariness they embodied, the novel confronted him with problems arising from his own surroundings, at the same itme holding our vairious potential solutions which the reader himself had, at least partially, to formulate.  What was presented in the novel led to a specific effect: namely, to involve the reader in the world of the novel and so to help him to understand it - and ultimately his own world - more clearly.

Page xi, emphasis mine.

Whether this might be said of some of the pulp fiction that fills our bookshops these days is an interesting postulate, but I am more immediately intrigued by the last sentence and its obvious parallel which reading both history and scripture.  To what extent does reading them involve us in the world they describe, and how does this help us to understand our world more clearly?  To what extent does reading, say the gospel according to Matthew or the letter to the church in Corinth involve me infirst centruy Christian culture?  I may come to read it expecting it to speak to me but is it as Iser suggests?  Or what of history?  Do I enter into, in some way, seventeenth centruy Baptist life, or is it more the world of the implied author somewhere in the twentieth century?  Yes, I want to make the case that this reading will 'help me to understand my own world more clearly,' to paraphrase Iser, but is this the intention of the writer?  I'm not so sure that it necessarily is.