Full Description
This book focuses on how readers can be 'manipulated' during their experience of reading fictional texts and how they are incited to perceive, process and interpret certain textual patterns. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry and novels, the book deciphers various linguistic, pragmatic and multimodal techniques. These are skilfully used by authors to achieve specific effects through a subtle manipulation of deixis, metalepsis, dialogue, metaphors, endings, inferences or rhetorical, narratorial and typographical control.
Exploring contemporary texts such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin, chapters delve into how readers are pragmatically positioned or cognitively (mis)directed as the author guides their attention and influences their judgment. They also show how readers' responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation as readers challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.
Contents
1. Introduction: Manipulation in Fiction, Sandrine Sorlin (University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
Part I. Manipulating Positions, Representations and Viewpoints
2. Metalepsis, Counterfactuality and the Forked Path in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Marina Lambrou (Kingston University, UK)
3. Social Deixis in Literature, Andrea Macrae (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
4. 'The Novel of the Future': Author's Manipulation in Henry Green's Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952), Rocío Montoro (University of Granada, Spain)
5. Building a World from the Day's Remains: Showing, Telling, Re-presenting, Jeremy Scott (University of Kent, UK)
Part II. Readers' Responses to Stylistic Manipulation
6. Manipulating Inferences: Interpretative Problems and their Effects on Readers, Billy Clark (Northumbria University, UK)
7. Readers' Textual Processing and Emotional Responses to a Story Ending: An Experimental Study of a Short Story by J.D. Salinger, Laura Hidalgo Downing (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)
8. Manipulating Metaphors: Interactions Between Readers and 'Upon Opening the Chest Freezer', Sara Whiteley (University of Sheffield, UK)
III. Multimodal and Genre-Specific Manipulation
9. Manipulation in Agatha Christie's Detective Stories: Rhetorical Control and Cognitive Misdirection in Creating and Solving Crime Puzzles, Catherine Emmott (University of Glasgow, UK) and Marc Alexander (University of Glasgow, UK)
10. Untranslatable Clues: Reader Manipulation and the Challenge of Crime Fiction Translation, Christiana Gregoriou (University of Leeds, UK)
11. Multimodal Manipulation of the Reader in Abrams and Dorst's S., Nina Nørgaard (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)
Index
