Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Experiencing Powerful Prose -- Part I Emotional Experiences: Textual Features Eliciting Positive, Negative or Mixed Emotions -- A Psycho-Biological Approach to Suspense and Horror: Triggers of Emotion in a Passage from Lewis's The Monk -- Repeated Pleasure: Reading the Threesome Ménage Romance as Digital Literature -- Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us -- Refiguring Reader-Response: Experience and Interpretation in J.G. Ballard's Crash -- Part II Coming to the Fore: The Subtle Influence of Rhythm, Sounds, and Sensory Representations -- Lives and Deaths of Gatsby: A Semantic Reading of a Key Passage in a Powerful Text -- Introducing Jane: The Power of the Opening -- Performing Rhythm Through Enunciation: Prose Versus Poetry -- The Pictorial Paradigm of La Vallée: A Text-Image Reading of the Incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho -- Part III Readers, Characters, Authors: Relations Formed by Textual Features -- The Nature of the Agonistic in a Pragmatics of Fiction -- The Relevance of Turning a Page: Monotony and Complexity in §25 of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King -- The Language of Engagement and the Projection of Storyworld Possible Selves in Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives -- "Smuggling in Accidental Poetry": Cognitive and Stylistic Strategies of a Stammering Teen in David Mitchell's Black Swan Green -- Contributors -- Editors -- Index

What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers to elucidate the effects and reader responses to investigate just that. The thirteen contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The collection investigates a variety of stylistic as well as readerly and psychological features responsible for short- and long-term effects - topics of great interest to those interested or specialized in literary studies and narratology, (cognitive) stylistics, empirical literary studies and reader response theory.

funded by Max-Planck-Institut für empirische Ästhetik

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 27. Okt 2021).

WorldCat record variable field(s) change: 050, 082, 650