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Copyright of Literatura y Lingüística is the property of Universidad Catolica Cardenal Raul Silva Henriquez and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In marking 200 years since Jane Austen died, this paper comes as a personal testimony of how I as a reader became more familiar with the person behind the name. Furthermore, it is the somewhat hidden, somewhat obvious intention of this paper to awake in Austen fans a desire to visit the place she lived in while writing her masterpieces and also the last place to have had her mark while she was alive and healthy. The effect will be inevitably the same as always; Jane Austen will become just Jane, my friend, that author I met once but cannot remember having shaken her hand, yet still she is familiar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the images of teachers presented in Taiwanese children's books published between 1960 and 2012 using the narrative theory outlined by Nikolajeva (Child Lit Assoc Q, 28(1):5-16, ). A purposive sample based upon the portrayal of school life is applied. One hundred and one books were identified as texts in which cultural messages about teachers were embedded. With respect to the depiction of teachers, three salient characteristics emerged from these texts: most images are positive; the teacher is often portrayed as a powerful animal; and the teacher is typically Han Chinese. Additionally, the modes of discourse that these writers used show their preference for realism, the first-person male perspective, and humor. As these findings attest, writing children's books portraying teachers and school lives is a practice regulated by pedagogical and didactic intent. These findings provide insight into the ways that teachers see themselves and their profession, in addition to how they are seen by others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Bolaño's novel deploys a modified form of realism that both evidences the “reality effect” defined by Roland Barthes and contributes to the democratization of the reading process theorized by Jacques Rancière. The novel's language and address of the reader thus mimic the politics of the Latin American avant-garde tradition but situate that politics in the realm of realistic detail, rather than within an avant-garde literary sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Just as people generate causal explanations for social events around them, story readers usually generate inferences about causality of events when reading a story. The attribution literature suggests that, when judging events that happen to others, people spontaneously generate dispositional explanations for negative events and situational explanations for positive events and the reverse when judging events that happen to themselves. Three experiments examined how these spontaneously generated inferences of causality interacted with causal explanations provided by the text of a story to influence perceived realism. The results indicate that the relationship between spontaneously generated causal attributions and information supplied by the story had little influence on realism judgments about story characters or about other people. When evaluating the story scenario for the self, however, results of all three experiments show that people find information consistent with their own spontaneous attributions more realistic. The results contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that may drive realism evaluations of stories and possible contrasting mechanisms between attributions in story worlds and the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various essays published within the issue including one on reparative reading and another on the realism of the novel.

"Transportation into a narrative world" (Green & Brock 2000, 2002 has been identified as a mechanism of narrative impact. A transported individual is cognitively and emotionally involved in the story and may experience vivid mental images. In the study reported here, undergraduate participants (N = 152 b read a narrative about a homosexual man attending his college fraternity reunion, rated their transportation into the story, rated the perceived realism of the story, and responded to statements describing story-relevant beliefs. Transportation was positively correlated with perceived realism. Furthermore, individuals with prior knowledge or experience relevant to the themes of the story (e.g., had homosexual friends or family members, were knowledgeable about American fraternities) showed greater transportation into the story. Highly transported readers showed more story-consistent beliefs, and the positive relationship between transportation and story-consistent beliefs held for those both with and without previous relevant experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]