Full Description
Immersion is the common readerly feeling of being lost in a book, your consciousness transported elsewhere, so that fictional places and people can feel vivid and real. It rests on a familiar human capacity for being completely absorbed by the object whether that is literature, film, gaming, sport, music, theatre, or play. This book contains fourteen explorations of immersion focusing on literary fiction, but also in poetry, song lyric, painting, social media, conspiracy theories, and children's literature. Immersion is one of the features of literature that is the most powerful, the most valued, and the most compelling aspect of the experience of literary reading.
Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Immersion - the experience of literary reading
Naomi Adam, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell, and Matthew Voice
Part I. Theoretical Innovations
2. Immersion and the Challenges of Character Constellations and Multiperspectivity
Ralf Schneider
3. Immersion and Narrative Empathy
Suzanne Keen
4. From Literary Immersion to Fission-fusion Aesthetics
Miranda Anderson
5. The Subliminal Factors of Immersion
Peter Stockwell
Part II. Cross-Modal Explorations
6. Absorbed by the Flat Earth: Conspiracy Immersion on TikTok
Jessica Mason
7. Understanding the Simulation-immersion Relationship
Harry Cooper
8. The Immersive Potential of an Ekphrastic Experience
Polina Gavin
9. Musical stylistic Immersion in Tom Waits' 'The piano has been drinking (not me)'
Matthew Voice
PART III. Literary Immersions
10. Escape to Wodehouse world
Alice Haines
11. The Paradoxical Properties of Immersive Metafiction
Ella Wydrzynska
12. Immersing Readers in the Text-worlds of Anxious People
Piergiorgio Trevisan and Gaetano Fiorin
13. The Spirit of Immersion: Ghosts in Award-winning Contemporary Fiction
Naomi Adam
14. Autism, Repetition and Flow in Literary Narratives
Andrew Currie
15. Embodied Cognition in Emergency Skin
Jessica Norledge
