ABSTRACT
A book can be a life-changing experience: for Augustine it was the New Testament, for Alexander the Great it was Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.1 Abraham Lincoln read and reread Macbeth several times over to contemplate the power of ambition.2 My own students’ essays and observations offer testimony to the insights they gained about the darker side of human nature from reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In fact, it is difficult to track the ways in which students are morally enlightened by the novels they read. As Wayne Booth observes, it is “always difficult to demonstrate” the “moral effects” of literature on the reader.
