Literature is a great achievement of humanity. Books move us; we defend them vehemently; we’re often impassioned by a text we pass onto others: only to find, at some point, words falling short of why a novel or poem has such power. In reviews and criticism, as in personal testimony or anecdote, it isn’t unusual to find overstatement (‘you will mourn [the protagonist] as you would for the dearest of your friends’; ‘art shows us how to end the war, the war between heart and head’) as rife as the nonchalance that rivals it (‘[changes in feeling after reading show] that fictions press our buttons; they don’t show that they refine us emotionally or in any other way’). Judgements less polarised also demonstrate the difficulty of speaking about the effect of a work of literature found to be meaningful. Passionate approval can easily lend itself to being dismissed under ‘emotivism’, defined by Alasdair MacIntyre as ‘the doctrine that all evaluative judgements and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character’. MacIntyre claims ‘emotivism has become embodied in our culture’; one consequent risk is that a value-laden response to a book or poem becomes subsumed under that label. Another is that emotional expression forms the standard style of reader or critical response. We’re more habituated to describing our reaction to a book during the course of reading or thereafter than specifying how a work makes its power felt or why we find it effective. Many of us find it hard to say much more than ‘it’s amazing—read it!’. Our lack of attention to literature’s workings renders claims for its effects, whether by authors, psychologists, readers, philosophers, critics, or anyone else, unconvincing, contributing to a larger cultural scepticism about literature’s capacity to matter.