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What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways that Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction associated with the growth of periodical publication in the nineteenth century but also the school subject we now know as English.Examining the full scope of Dickens's literary production, Winter shows how his serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning and reading founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens's serial novels consistently lead readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience, thus channeling their personal memories of Dickens's unforgettablescenes and characters into a public reception reaching across social classes. Dickens's celebrity authorship, Winter argues, represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth-century educational reforms in Britain and the United States consolidated Dickens's heterogeneous constituency of readers into the masspopulations served by national and state school systems, however, Dickens's beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education.

What happens to books as they live in our long-term memory? Why do we find some books entertaining and others not? And how does literary influence work on writers in different ways? Grounded in the findings of empirical psychology, this book amends classic reader-response theory and attends to neglected aspects of reading that cannot be explained by traditional literary criticism. Reading arises from a combination of two kinds of mental work: automatic and controlled processes. Automatic processes, such as the ability to see visual symbols as words, are the result of constant practice; controlled processes, such as predicting what might occur next in a story, arise from readers' conscious use of skills and background knowledge. When we read, automatic and controlled processes work together to create the \"gist\" of reading, the constant interplay between these two kinds of processes. Andrew Elfenbein not only explains how we read today, but also uses current knowledge about reading to consider readers of past centuries, arguing that understanding gist is central to interpreting the social, psychological, and political impact of literary works. The result is the first major revisionary account of reading practices in literary criticism since the 1970s.

Why do Americans read contemporary fiction? This question seems simple, but is it? Do Americans read for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation? To satisfy their own insatiable intellectual curiosities? While other forms of media have come to monopolize consumers' leisure time, in the past two decades book clubs have proliferated, Amazon has sponsored thriving online discussions, Oprah Winfrey has inspired millions of viewers to read both contemporary works and classics, and novels have retained their devoted following within middlebrow communities. InReading as Therapy, Timothy Aubry argues that contemporary fiction serves primarily as a therapeutic tool for lonely, dissatisfied middle-class American readers, one that validates their own private dysfunctions while supporting elusive communities of strangers unified by shared feelings. Aubry persuasively makes the case that contemporary literature's persistent appeal depends upon its capacity to perform a therapeutic function. Aubry traces the growth and proliferation of psychological concepts focused on the subjective interior within mainstream, middle-class society and the impact this has had on contemporary fiction. The prevailing tendency among academic critics has been to decry the personal emphasis of contemporary fiction as complicit with the rise of a narcissistic culture, the ascendency of liberal individualism, and the breakdown of public life.Reading as Therapy, by contrast, underscores the varied ideological effects that therapeutic culture can foster. To uncover the many unpredictable ways in which contemporary literature answers the psychological needs of its readers, Aubry considers several different venues of reader-response-including Oprah's Book Club and Amazon customer reviews-the promotional strategies of publishing houses, and a variety of contemporary texts, ranging from Khaled Hosseini'sThe Kite Runnerto Anita Shreve'sThe Pilot's Wifeto David Foster Wallace'sInfinite Jest. He concludes that, in the face of an atomistic social landscape, contemporary fiction gives readers a therapeutic vocabulary that both reinforces the private sphere and creates surprising forms of sympathy and solidarity among strangers.

This work seeks to chart what happens in the embodied minds of engaged readers when they read literature. Despite the recent stylistic, linguistic, and cognitive advances that have been made in text-processing methodology and practice, very little is known about this cultural-cognitive process and especially about the role that emotion plays. Burk’s theoretical and empirical study focuses on three central issues: the role emotions play in a core cognitive event like literary text processing; the kinds of bottom-up and top-down inputs most prominently involved in the literary reading process; and what might be happening in the minds and bodies of engaged readers when they experience intense or heightened emotions: a phenomenon sometimes labelled \"reader epiphany.\" This study postulates that there is a free-flow of bottom-up and top-down affective, cognitive inputs during the engaged act of literary reading, and that reading does not necessarily begin or end when our eyes apprehend the words on the page. Burke argues that the literary reading human mind might best be considered both figuratively and literally, not as computational or mechanical, but as oceanic. Michael Burke is the Head of the Academic Core Department and is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Pedagogy and English at the Roosevelt Academy Middelburg (Utrecht University). His publications include Contextualised Stylistics (with Stockwell and Bex). List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1: The Secret Lives of Reading and Remembering 2: Seeing, Thinking and Feeling 3: Literary Reading-induced Mental Imagery 4: Reading Moods and Reading Places 5: The Affective Nature of Literary Themes 6: From Style on the Page to Style in the Mind 7: Towards a Model of Emotion in Literary Reading 8: Literary Closure and Reader Epiphany 9: Reading the Closing Lines of The Great Gatsby 10: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of the The Great Gatsby at Closure 11: Disportation Notes Bibliography Index

After retiring from teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, young adult fiction, canonical works she didn’t like, guilty pleasures. On Rereading records the surprising, fascinating results of her personal experiment and raises a number of intriguing questions.

Imagery and Text, Second Edition extends the first edition's unified theory of cognition in literacy from the perspective of Dual Coding Theory (DCT), one of the most influential and empirically sound theories of cognition ever developed. This theory provides a comprehensive, systematic account of all major aspects of literacy including decoding, comprehension, and response in reading and composing in writing. The Second Edition updates DCT as a scientific theory, a cognitive theory, an embodied theory, and a constructivist theory of literacy. New content includes a detailed account of the decoding process and its integral connection to comprehension, a new program of research on DCT in composing text, a review of neuroscientific support, and increased attention to multimedia literacy, socio-cultural influences, and recent educational applications. More than any other theory, DCT explains how both verbal and nonverbal cognition are woven together through all aspects of literacy. Written in concise chapters with illustrative examples, Imagery and Text is approachable for both students and advanced scholars in the field of literacy.

In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, reading-and particularly book reading-precipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative world-an author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrity-the idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world. While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging,Bodies and Booksemphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.

Narrative Absorption brings together research from the social sciences and Humanities to solve a number of mysteries: Most of us will have had those moments, of being totally absorbed in a book, a movie, or computer game.

Imagery and Text: A Dual Coding Theory of Reading and Writing presents, for the first time, a unified theory of both reading and writing that derives from and is completely consistent with the Dual Coding Theory of cognition, one of the most influential and empirically sound theories of cognition ever developed. This is the first book to take a systematic theoretical approach to all of the central issues of literacy, including decoding, comprehension, and memory in reading; and planning, drafting, and reviewing in writing. Additionally, theoretical accounts are provided for such profound and elusive literacy concepts as meaning, engagement, inspiration, and persona. Dual Coding Theory is unique in theorizing how both verbal and nonverbal cognition are woven throughout all aspects of literacy. An outstanding advancement in understanding literacy, Imagery and Text: A Dual Coding Theory of Reading and Writing : * Explains the major aspects of both reading and writing from an empirically well-established cognitive theory that embraces both language and mental imagery, emphasizing the powerful role of nonlinguistic knowledge and mental imagery in literacy; * Offers a human alternative to current computer-based theories of cognition and literacy derived from artificial intelligence, treating literacy as an essentially human activity that includes imagery and affect; * Provides moment-by-moment accounts of both the reading process and the writing process and comparisons with other theories; and * Presents an extensive review of educational research on the application of dual coding theory. Contents: Preface. Introduction: A Unified Theory of Literacy. Historical and Philosophical Background. Dual Coding in Literacy. Meaning and Comprehension. Memory and Remembering. The Reading Process. Written Composition. Educational Implications.