The point about developing empathy is a very important one. I also find that good reading, whether it be considered "real" literature or just lighter fiction, has deep characters and gives me an insight into how it is to be that person. Insights that can help me better understand and respect real people who have similarities to some aspect of that. Of course we always need to question, when reading about a person extremely far from our personal experience, how realistically that character is portrayed. Are they a mere stereotype or are their experiences, quirks, whatever accurate for their time period, culture, or whatever else it reflects. I've read some books I found very clearly relied purely on stereotypes, but would I have recognized that without knowledge of the real culture being portrayed stereotypically?
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I guess that how an author uses stereotypes and how far he stretches from them in character developing is really what builds the ladder from, if you want, lighter fiction to literature (academic approved), fairy-tale like to realistic (there is also unrealistic fantasy and realistic fantasy, the second one being represented by the magic realism), so on so forth. What the book does through language is to create a network of stereotypes which relate to each other in a way that gives and authentic sense of a certain situation or event, or state of life. Like, for example, when in "As I lay dying", Faulkner creates real visceral trauma and he pushes us hard in his twisted character's skin through a use of language that is totally unique, as he does also in "The sound and the fury". A different book may describe the same events but not go so deep into the character's inner structure because the focus of the author is a different one, or maybe the author was a "light" one and really didn't know how to build he wanted to.