- Home
- e-Journals
- Scientific Study of Literature
- Fast Track Listing
Scientific Study of Literature - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
-
-
Readers during the Covid-19 pandemic
Author(s): Karin Kukkonen and Ylva ØstbyAvailable online: 28 November 2022More LessAbstractThis study investigates reading literature during the Covid-19 pandemic in Norway. In three surveys conducted across 2020 (combined N = 489), readers were asked about their reading habits, motivations for reading and emotional states after reading. Our results showed that Norwegian readers read more during the pandemic. However, only a minority reported changing their reasons for reading and their reading habits because of the pandemic. For these readers, a feeling of safety and distraction from the ongoing pandemic seemed to be of higher importance. Readers overall experienced that reading allows them to achieve the emotional state they desire, indicating the role reading plays in emotion regulation during the pandemic. We compare these results across gender and age differences. We conclude that reading appears to work as a cultural strategy that helps coping with the pandemic situation.
-
-
-
Preaching to the Choir and Beyond
Author(s): Ruoyan Zeng and Ellen WinnerAvailable online: 25 November 2022More LessAbstractDo narratives about suffering enhance empathy? Readers experience empathy for story characters, but does that empathy spill over into the “real” world? We investigated whether a narrative in the form of a memoir by an undocumented immigrant in the United States (compared to an expository account about undocumented immigrants) softens attitudes towards this group. Across three studies, the narrative yielded greater attitude change in the direction of empathy than did the expository reading, with this effect in some cases still visible one month later. We conclude that, compared to an expository account, a narrative about the suffering of an individual in a marginalized group renders attitudes towards members of this group more positive for those already sympathetic (Study 1) and for those initially unsympathetic (Studies 2 and 3). Study 3 demonstrated that this effect generalized to attitudes about Black Americans despite no mention of race relations in the narrative.
-
-
-
Style of creative nonfiction
Author(s): Marianna GrachevaAvailable online: 29 September 2022More LessAbstractThe study examines author style within underlying patterns of variation in nonfiction essays. The study employs corpus linguistic methodology, building on research on style in fiction ( Biber & Finegan, 1994 ; Biber, 2008b ; Egbert, 2012 ), applies a multidimensional analysis to a corpus of nonfiction essays written by modern authors, a previously unexplored domain, and identifies four unique but interrelated dimensions of variation based on linguistic co-occurrence: Interactive vs. Informational Style, Abstract Expository vs. Concrete Descriptive Style, Immediate vs. Removed Style, and Hypothetical Style. Authors’ works are then plotted along these dimensions, revealing stylistic tendencies with relation to the observed patterns of variation. The study also observes that considerable within-author variation along a given dimension results from differences in situational characteristics of individual texts rather than simply idiosyncratic preferences for certain language. The study contributes to the field of corpus stylistics and has practical implications for creative writing, literary analysis, and translation.
-