The Nature of the Agonistic in a Pragmatics of Fiction

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Contents 5
3. Acknowledgments 9
4. Experiencing Powerful Prose 11
5. Part I Emotional Experiences: Textual Features Eliciting Positive, Negative or Mixed Emotions
6. A Psycho-Biological Approach to Suspense and Horror: Triggers of Emotion in a Passage from Lewis’s The Monk 25
7. Repeated Pleasure: Reading the Threesome Ménage Romance as Digital Literature 45
8. Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us 63
9. Refiguring Reader-Response: Experience and Interpretation in J.G. Ballard’s Crash 77
10. Part II Coming to the Fore: The Subtle Influence of Rhythm, Sounds, and Sensory Representations
11. Lives and Deaths of Gatsby: A Semantic Reading of a Key Passage in a Powerful Text 99
12. Introducing Jane: The Power of the Opening 111
13. Performing Rhythm Through Enunciation: Prose Versus Poetry 129
14. The Pictorial Paradigm of La Vallée: A Text-Image Reading of the Incipit of The Mysteries of Udolpho 145
15. Part III Readers, Characters, Authors: Relations Formed by Textual Features
16. The Nature of the Agonistic in a Pragmatics of Fiction 167
17. The Relevance of Turning a Page: Monotony and Complexity in §25 of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King 189
18. The Language of Engagement and the Projection of Storyworld Possible Selves in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives 207
19. “Smuggling in Accidental Poetry”: Cognitive and Stylistic Strategies of a Stammering Teen in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green 231
20. Contributors 249
21. Editors 253
22. Index 254