When Fiction Feels Real
Representation and the Reading Mind
Elaine Auyoung
Reviews and Awards
"[An] ambitious and highly original book" - Jonathan Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement
"a thoughtful contribution to the growing field of cognitive literary studies." - Supritha Rajan, Victorian Studies
"Auyoung... enables an exceptionally fresh, even wondrous reversal of the usual order of critical priorities: Auyoung asks not what literature's 'working' trains us to do in life, but how we are trained by our lifelong, ordinary cognitive functioning in order for literature to 'work.'" - Elisha Cohn, Victorian Literature and Culture
"Elaine Auyoung's luminous new book [is] a deeply serious, scholarly consideration of a set of questions that are important to our field. In both her lucid writing style and the very framing of her inquiry, she reflects the ethic of inclusion and collaboration she describes ... Auyoung models a mode of partnership that is hopeful and helpful for the future of literary studies." - Carolyn Dever, V21 Book Forum
"Both generous and timely. . . . her work beautifully exemplifies why this interdisciplinary approach is among the most compelling fields of literary inquiry. Auyoung helps us to understand why and how certain strategies of storytelling have mattered so much to us for so long and why they should continue to command our time and critical energies." - Studies in the Novel
"While a pillar of close reading is that every word matters, Auyoung's work demonstrates the primacy of the situation model that the reader acquires from the text over its precise expression in language. Indeed, throughout her book, she redirects attention to the reader's role and privileges the ways that texts enable ease of comprehension, rather than difficulty and defamiliarization. And by breaking down this comprehension process into its component parts, Auyoung defamiliarizes for us an experience that we otherwise take for granted ... Auyoung shows that we are continually reaching for that fictional world, primed by the text to feel it's real." - Priyanka Anne Jacob, Modern Philology
"a deeply researched, thoroughly argued, and provocative approach ... Part of what makes When Fiction Feels Real so resonant and enjoyable is the fact that most if not all of Auyoung's readers have experienced for themselves the phenomena the book seeks to legitimate as worthy of study ... Auyoung makes good on her promise of providing a fresh and productive approach to better comprehending at once our own private attachments to nineteenth-century fiction and our collective critical investments." - Lauren N. Hoffer, Review of English Studies
"When Fiction Feels Real is required reading for those interested in cognitive approaches to literature, theories of reading, realism, and the 19th-century novel." - L. Goodman, CHOICE
"When Fiction Feels Real focuses on an almost dangerously fundamental literary question: how does fictional representation actually work? How are novel readers led to see words as worlds? Elaine Auyoung pursues this question at the intersection of author and reader, aesthetic technique and cognitive psychology. By keeping such a steady eye on the how of literary realism — rather than on its causes or its implications — Auyoung has carved out a new and inviting field of scholarly inquiry." - Alex Woloch, Stanford University
"Elaine Auyoung describes in loving and persuasive detail the phenomenology of reading realist fiction, attending to how novelists activate sensory, affective, and intellectual responses in readers ... The beauty of this book is its nuanced consideration of alternative possibilities in representational strategies on the part of a handful of canonical novelists." - Suzanne Keen, Hamilton College
