Powerful Prose : How Textual Features Impact Readers

What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers who tackle the question by investigating the effects and reader responses generated by selected extracts of literary prose. The twelve 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 explores 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.

R. L. Victoria Pöhls works as a researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt). Her interest in studying literature with both hermeneutical and empirical methods evolved during graduate studies in cognitive science (University College Dublin) and literature, linguistics, and philosophy (Universität Hamburg). To foster interdisciplinary work at the frontiers of these disciplines, she cofounded the Powerful Literary Fiction Texts-Network in 2019. Her research focuses on comparative, empirical, and cognitive approaches to literature and is especially concerned with the portrayal of minorities.

Mariane Utudji has completed a PhD thesis in English studies and translatology at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris), a work which investigates Salman Rushdie's highly valued prose style and shows how the reading experience it provides can be retained or recreated in French. Her approach to literary texts thus combines stylistics, applied linguistics and translation studies, and she is getting more and more interested in cognitive linguistics. She cofounded the Powerful Literary Fiction Texts- Network in 2019.