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 while offering new perspectives on narrative theory, the novel, 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 intricate relationship between fictional representation and comprehension.

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.

Reviews
Auyoung's book is an elegantly written and concisely argued study. It offers fascinating insight into the way in which readers collaborate with texts in order to construct vibrant and convincing fictions that exist outside the parameters of the text itself. * Georgia Walton, George Eliot Review *
[An] ambitious and highly original book * Jonathan Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement *
a thoughtful contribution to the growing field of cognitive literary studies. * Supritha Rajan, Victorian Studies *
Auyoung... enables an exceptionally fresh, even wondrous reversal of the usual order of critical priorities: Auyoung asks not what literature's 'working' trains us to do in life, but how we are trained by our lifelong, ordinary cognitive functioning in order for literature to 'work.' * Elisha Cohn, Victorian Literature and Culture *
Elaine Auyoung's luminous new book [is] a deeply serious, scholarly consideration of a set of questions that are important to our field. In both her lucid writing style and the very framing of her inquiry, she reflects the ethic of inclusion and collaboration she describes ... Auyoung models a mode of partnership that is hopeful and helpful for the future of literary studies. * Carolyn Dever, V21 Book Forum *
Both generous and timely. . . . her work beautifully exemplifies why this interdisciplinary approach is among the most compelling fields of literary inquiry. Auyoung helps us to understand why and how certain strategies of storytelling have mattered so much to us for so long and why they should continue to command our time and critical energies. * Studies in the Novel *
While a pillar of close reading is that every word matters, Auyoung's work demonstrates the primacy of the situation model that the reader acquires from the text over its precise expression in language. Indeed, throughout her book, she redirects attention to the reader's role and privileges the ways that texts enable ease of comprehension, rather than difficulty and defamiliarization. And by breaking down this comprehension process into its component parts, Auyoung defamiliarizes for us an experience that we otherwise take for granted ... Auyoung shows that we are continually reaching for that fictional world, primed by the text to feel it's real. * Priyanka Anne Jacob, Modern Philology *
a deeply researched, thoroughly argued, and provocative approach ... Part of what makes When Fiction Feels Real so resonant and enjoyable is the fact that most if not all of Auyoung's readers have experienced for themselves the phenomena the book seeks to legitimate as worthy of study ... Auyoung makes good on her promise of providing a fresh and productive approach to better comprehending at once our own private attachments to nineteenth-century fiction and our collective critical investments. * Lauren N. Hoffer, Review of English Studies *
When Fiction Feels Real is required reading for those interested in cognitive approaches to literature, theories of reading, realism, and the 19th-century novel. * L. Goodman, CHOICE *
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 *
The book offers its readers a range of case studies in which they can see how cognitive approaches to reading function in practice. I think this is Auyoung's most significant achievement and scholars interested in cognitive methods would definitely benefit from reading it. * Alkisti Kallinikou, British Society for Literature and Science *
The book offers its readers a range of case studies in which they can see how cognitive approaches to reading function in practice. I think this is Auyoung's most significant achievement and scholars interested in cognitive methods would definitely benefit from reading it. Realistic narratives certainly offer fertile ground for the discussions Auyoung engages in, but it would be interesting to see how these methods function in the study of other genres as well. * Alkisti Kallinikou, The British Society for Literature and Science *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190845476
Author Elaine Auyoung
Format Hardback
Page Count 176
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 363g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 236mm * 20mm