Immersion – the sense of attentional involvement and displacement in a fictional world – has been established as an experiential phenomenon in psychology and psycholinguistics, but little focus has been given to the understanding of the nature of the experience itself, especially in relation to literary texts. Most work on immersion as “cognitive flow” has been produced in relation to multimedia settings such as videogames. This chapter draws on naturalistic, non-experimental reader responses to explore the cognitive poetics of literary immersion. In particular, immersion is addressed as an aspect of the developmental literacy of readers, with reference to the different ways that child-readers and adult-readers cast their minds towards fictional characters and emerge emotionally from fictional worlds.
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Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Norledge, Jessica
2022. Building Dystopian Worlds. In The Language of Dystopia [Palgrave Studies in Language, Literature and Style, ], ► pp. 61 ff.
Pianzola, Federico
2021. Presence, flow, and narrative absorption questionnaires: a scoping review. Open Research Europe 1 ► pp. 11 ff.
Pianzola, Federico
2021. Presence, flow, and narrative absorption questionnaires: a scoping review. Open Research Europe 1 ► pp. 11 ff.
Statham, Simon
2020. The year’s work in stylistics 2019. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 29:4 ► pp. 454 ff.
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