When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind - Hardcover

Auyoung, Elaine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190845473 ISBN 13: 9780190845476

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Why do readers claim that fictional worlds feel real? How can certain literary characters seem capable of leading lives of their own, outside the stories in which they appear? What makes the experience of reading a novel uniquely pleasurable and what do readers lose when this experience comes to an end? Since their first publication, nineteenth-century realist novels like Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina have inspired readers to describe literary experience as gaining access to vibrant fictional worlds and becoming friends with fictional characters. While this effect continues to be central to the experience of reading realist fiction and later works in this tradition, the capacity for novels to evoke persons and places in a reader's mind has often been taken for granted and even dismissed as a naive phenomenon unworthy of critical attention.

When Fiction Feels Real provides literary studies with new tools for thinking about the phenomenology of reading by bringing narrative techniques into conversation with psychological research on reading and cognition. Through close readings of classic novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy, and the elegies of Thomas Hardy, Elaine Auyoung reveals what nineteenth-century writers know about how reading works. Building on well-established research on the mind, Auyoung exposes the underpinnings of the seemingly impossible achievement of realist fiction, introducing new perspectives on narrative theory, mimesis, and fictionality. When Fiction Feels Real changes the way we think about literary language, realist aesthetics, and the reading process, opening up a new field of inquiry centered on the relationship between fictional representation and comprehension.

About this title

About the Author

Elaine Auyoung is McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Assistant Professor of English, and Affiliate Faculty of the Center for Cognitive Sciences.

From the Back Cover

"When Fiction Feels Real focuses on an almost dangerously fundamental literary question: how does fictional representation actually work? How are novel readers led to see words as worlds? Elaine Auyoung pursues this question at the intersection of author and reader, aesthetic technique and cognitive psychology. By keeping such a steady eye on the how of literary realism -- rather than on its causes or its implications -- Auyoung has carved out a new and inviting field of scholarly inquiry." -- Alex Woloch, Stanford University

"Elaine Auyoung describes in loving and persuasive detail the phenomenology of reading realist fiction, attending to how novelists activate sensory, affective, and intellectual responses in readers. . . . The beauty of this book is its nuanced consideration of alternative possibilities in representational strategies on the part of a handful of canonical novelists." -- Suzanne Keen, Hamilton College

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190845473
• ISBN 13: 9780190845476
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176