Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before, during, and after reading

Abstract

Emotions are central to the experience of literary narrative fiction. Affect and mood can influence what book people choose, based partly on whether their goal is to change or maintain their current emotional state. Once having chosen a book, the narrative itself acts to evoke and transform emotions, both directly through the events and characters depicted and through the cueing of emotionally valenced memories. Once evoked by the story, these emotions can in turn influence a person's experience of the narrative. Lastly, emotions experienced during reading may have consequences after closing the covers of a book. This article reviews the current state of empirical research for each of these stages, providing a snapshot of what is known about the interaction between emotions and literary narrative fiction. With this, we can begin to sketch the outlines of what remains to be discovered.

Keywords:

• Reading
• Emotion
• Memory
• Literature
• Media
• Imagination

Acknowledgements

Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant awarded to RAM.

Notes

¹We thank a generous anonymous reviewer for this idea.

²This willingness to leave a book unfinished is likely an individual difference, perhaps related to the construct Need for Closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994).

³We thank a generous anonymous reviewer for this idea.

⁴We thank a generous anonymous reviewer for this idea.

⁵We thank a generous anonymous reviewer for this idea.

⁶We thank a generous anonymous reviewer for this idea.