The Psychological and Social Effects of Literariness: Formal Features and Paratextual Information

This chapter explores the effects of literariness on readers’ psychological and social understandings within and beyond literary texts. Literariness is introduced as (a) a function of specific textual features that create linguistic foregrounding and (b) the positioning of a text as literary through para-textual signifiers (such as non-fiction and fiction labelling). After a brief review of the history of research on literariness, we discuss empirical studies of the role of paratext (such as non-fiction and fiction labelling) in the processing of texts and connect this research to the concepts of identification and perspective taking. We introduce research on readers’ responses to the formal features of narrative and highlight the role of literary techniques in the non-literary context of journalism.