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Part of
Experiencing Fictional Worlds
Edited by Benedict Neurohr and Lizzie Stewart-Shaw
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 32] 2019
► pp. 15–32

Chapter 2
Immersion and emergence in children’s literature

Immersion – the sense of attentional involvement and displacement in a fictional world – has been established as an experiential phenomenon in psychology and psycholinguistics, but little focus has been given to the understanding of the nature of the experience itself, especially in relation to literary texts. Most work on immersion as “cognitive flow” has been produced in relation to multimedia settings such as videogames. This chapter draws on naturalistic, non-experimental reader responses to explore the cognitive poetics of literary immersion. In particular, immersion is addressed as an aspect of the developmental literacy of readers, with reference to the different ways that child-readers and adult-readers cast their minds towards fictional characters and emerge emotionally from fictional worlds.

Keywords: immersion, emergence, emotion, literacy, The Railway Children , mind-casting, deixis, text-worlds
Article outline
  • 2.1Immersion and its correlates
  • 2.2The developmental literacy of immersion
  • 2.3Mind-casting and emergence
  • 2.4Immersion, emergence, emotion, resonance
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.32.02sto
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