Immersion: The Experience of Literary Reading

(Hardback)

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Description

Immersion is the common readerly feeling of being lost in a book, your consciousness transported elsewhere, so that fictional places and people can feel vivid and real. It rests on a familiar human capacity for being completely absorbed by the object whether that is literature, film, gaming, sport, music, theatre, or play. This book contains fourteen explorations of immersion focusing on literary fiction, but also in poetry, song lyric, painting, social media, conspiracy theories, and children's literature. Immersion is one of the features of literature that is the most powerful, the most valued, and the most compelling aspect of the experience of literary reading.

Author Bio

Naomi Adam is Researcher in literary linguistics at the University of Liverpool and the University of Nottingham. Her research interests span award-winning and/or contemporary fiction, fictolinguistics, narrative ontologies, popular culture and postcolonial fiction. Her work has been published in outlets including English Text Construction, the Journal of Language and Pop Culture, and Language and Literature. She is currently preparing the monograph Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction, scheduled for publication in 2026. Naomi is also the Editor of the Poetics and Linguistics Association's biannual newsletter, Parlance.