Literary Reading

Book excerpt: This is the first major book in English on literary reading to be based on empirical methods. Moving the focus away from interpretation to the experience of literary texts, these studies demonstrate the role played by feeling in readers' responses, showing how feeling performs important functions during reading that cannot be accounted for by cognitive understanding. These studies not only reinvigorate the concept of literariness, they are also thoroughly interdisciplinary, offering a coherent approach to literary reading that draws on literary theory, psychology, neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology. Several chapters help to introduce the empirical approach for students.