Literature confronts us with the question of what it knows and of what kind of knowledge it may be said to yield. Paisley Livingston helpfully summarizes the major theories of literature’s engagement with knowledge in philosophical aesthetics. This chapter highlights the significance of the tradition of literary agnoiology and aims to investigate the ways in which ignorance may be understood to be aroused, enacted, and explored in literature. There are, in fact, at least three distinct spheres in which the condition of literary ignorance may be understood to operate: authorship; and the text itself, both thematically and with respect to more formal or technical questions of narrative perspective. The limitation on what the narrator knows itself plays out the ignorance, doubt, uncertainty, and conceptual or narrative hesitation that characterizes the literary. The chapter suggests that literature has a distinguished pedigree in its engagement with ignorance, but that despite its centrality the question is often overlooked, forgotten, elided or denied.