Book excerpt: This book examines eighteenth-century novels, with a focus on the skills that readers were expected to master in order to read these works. It analyses how such skills were shaped by the cultural and political climate of the time. Starting with a review of the debate on education that began in England in the eighteenth-century and the way it was influenced by philosophers such as John Locke, it then discusses the demands that novelists like Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Godwin, Smollett and Richardson made concerning this subject. Various scientific, philosophical, religious and linguistic theories are used to examine the issues above: Chaos Theory, Wittgenstein’s idea of “logical space”, Grice’s cooperative principle, Aristotle’s poetics and de Molinos’ Quietism.