Towards a new understanding of absorbing reading experiences

When reading literary narratives, we assume that readers can get absorbed in the story world and in the story’s artifice. Since most absorption research focuses primarily on popular media, virtually no attention has been paid to the possibility that literary devices such as deviation could elicit absorption experiences or that absorption could be aesthetic in nature. This chapter takes an interdisciplinary approach combining insights from media psychology, literary studies, and aesthetics to present a theoretical framework for two different varieties of narrative aesthetic absorption during reading: story world absorption and artifact absorption. We propose that these varieties mirror the distinction made by narratologists between story and discourse and the distinction made by emotion psychologists between F and A emotions.