Foregrounding and feeling in response to narrative

This chapter provides a framework for considering some of the determinants and implications of readers’ feelings in response to a story by Katherine Mansfield, previously featured in an empirical study of foregrounding (Miall & Kuiken 1994). In additional analyses I focus on feelings that distinguish the story’s episodic structure, its narrative perspective, and phonetic patterns, and consider their effectiveness in post-predicting readers’ data from the 1994 study. Finally, I examine those processes of feeling that may be distinctive to literary response (Miall & Kuiken 2001), and situate the discussion in relation to a theory of readers’ feelings offered by Oatley (2002).