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Part of
Experiencing Fictional Worlds
Edited by Benedict Neurohr and Lizzie Stewart-Shaw
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 32] 2019
► pp. 75–95

Chapter 5
Experiencing horrible worlds

In this chapter, I explore how conceptual movement within the fictional worlds of horror can affect the reader’s emotional experience of the text. I argue that horror fiction necessarily requires “horrible” world-building elements and function-advancing propositions to establish the macabre ambience of the fictional world, which contributes to the reader’s experience of negative emotions such as anxiety and fear. Once this uncomfortable world is established, various types of world creation can manipulate the reader’s attention to bring about such negative emotional responses. Drawing on Text World Theory (Gavins 2007) and attention and resonance (Stockwell 2009a) to investigate this phenomenon, I conduct a stylistic analysis of how the text-worlds of Stephen King’s IT (1986) are built and experienced by readers.

Keywords: horror fiction, texture, Text World Theory, attention, negation, emotion, Stephen King
Article outline
  • 5.1Introduction
  • 5.2Building and experiencing horrible worlds
  • 5.3Stephen King’s IT
    • 5.3.1Category jamming in IT
    • 5.3.2Conceptual movement in IT
  • 5.4Manipulation in the text-worlds of horror
    • 5.4.1Foreshadowing
    • 5.4.2World-building manipulation
  • 5.5Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.32.05ste
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