Reader empathy, textual features and the novel

IF 0.7 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Language and Literature Pub Date : 2026-06-04 DOI:10.1177/09639470261458875

Lucy Peacock

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Most existing scholarship on reader empathy is either mostly theoretical (for example, Bourget, 2023; Keen, 2007), or uses short texts in empirical settings to gauge readers’ reactions (Fernandez-Quintanilla, 2020; Koopman, 2016; Van Peer and Pander Maat, 1996). This exploratory study used a reader survey in which respondents were asked to reflect on their emotional response to a novel which they had read in the course of their normal reading. The novels mentioned in the survey could thus be categorised into those which produced high degrees of empathy in readers and novels that did not. Through analysis of these novels, a number of textual features were identified which were more common in the higher empathy novels. These features include present tense narration, asynchrony, greater use of narrated perception, and a greater proportion of all categories of represented consciousness at the most emotional part of the story.

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读者共情、文本特征与小说

大多数现有的关于读者共情的学术研究要么主要是理论上的（例如，Bourget, 2023; Keen, 2007），要么在实证环境中使用短文本来衡量读者的反应（Fernandez-Quintanilla, 2020; Koopman, 2016； Van Peer和Pander Maat， 1996）。这项探索性研究采用了一项读者调查，在调查中，受访者被要求反映他们在正常阅读过程中阅读小说时的情绪反应。因此，调查中提到的小说可以分为两类，一类能让读者产生高度同理心，另一类则不能。通过对这些小说的分析，我们发现了一些在高移情小说中更为常见的文本特征。这些特征包括现在时叙述、异步、更多地使用叙述感知，以及在故事最情绪化的部分更大比例地呈现所有类别的意识。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Language and Literature Multiple-

CiteScore

1.70

自引率

14.30%

发文量

期刊介绍： Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.