Vivifications of literary investigation

A rich base of research has investigated the types of responses that literature engenders in readers. In the current contribution, we consider other aspects of the reading experience that have, to date, gone relatively ignored in empirical study. We explore issues including authors’ decisions about literary constructions, readers’ responses to real-world texts, affective evocations (and their neural underpinnings), and how we know what people have learned from the novels they read. With each issue we recommend potential approaches and methods that might usefully support scientific investigations of readers’ engagements with classic and contemporary literature.