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This paper analyses how representations of real life and fictional worlds are combined and differentiated in the talk produced in literary reading groups. We adopt a socio-cognitive approach to reading group interaction, which combines discourse analysis and Text World Theory to examine the social and cognitive processes enacted in examples of such talk. Text World Theory is a cognitive linguistic discourse analysis framework which examines the mental spaces ("worlds") cued by language-in-use and the ontological relations between those worlds. This combined framework is applied to four extracts of reading group talk and facilitates the discussion of the structural, referential and representational aspects of the interaction. Our analysis considers the insights which reading group talk provides into the complex relationships between text and talk. We argue that ontological shifting in reading group talk performs various functions, such as claiming expertise, doing humour and play, and mitigating face-threatening disagreement. Talking about texts allows people these options for shifting between representations of real life and fictional worlds and this may go some way towards accounting for the popularity of such groups in contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Van der Bom et al.'s next chapter follows with a discussion on reader expectations of a digital fiction text which invites another "disruptive" (p. 123) reading experience. Style and Reader Response: Minds, Media, Methods Bell, Alice Browse, Sam Gibbons, Alison Peplow, David eds. [Extracted from the article]

The UK-wide Equality Act 2010 forbids discrimination based on age, sex, race, religion/belief, disability, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity – yet no such protections apply to people experiencing poverty and/or class-based inequalities. This legislative 'blind-spot' extends to UK media regulation, with most industry ethical codes prioritizing the same 'protected characteristics' as the law. As a result, legacy print news outlets and their audiences can freely publish statements about people in poverty that would be defined as hate speech; ruled in breach of ethical codes; and liable for potential prosecution if directed at protected groups. This article explores the prevalence of povertyist hatred on comments published on two conservative-leaning news-sites (www.telegraph.co.uk and www.dailymail.co.uk) in response to articles about rising labour shortages and 'economic inactivity' rates during the post-COVID-19 'cost-of-living crisis'. It exposes serious gaps in the legal and regulatory framework(s) around protected characteristics, while also posing difficult questions for editors and moderators about the (in)adequacy of their existing policies for safeguarding groups already protected by law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the exploitation of human suffering, known as "poverty porn," in television (TV) in India that functions as a platform mirroring local societal interactions, circulating sociocultural realities among ordinary people. It states that Third World tragedies are romanticized for sensational content in poverty porn, evoking empathy. It highlights that this sensationalism is evident in global media as well, shaping public perceptions and responses to various political events.

This article describes an archive consisting of literary memories obtained via interviews from one hundred contemporary readers of literature, sourced from a college town in the United States. The memories were summarized and studied in order to establish what readers tend to remember as important and/or impressive in their everyday reading of literature. The summaries include both quantitative and qualitative data, which are presented in brief extracts (tables) referring to facts such as recall of textual elements, circumstances of reading, and most remembered texts and authors. Characteristics of non-professional readers and their readings are thus observed according to three distinct sources of information: (a) the type of text they preferred; (b) the context of their reading; (c) the textual elements they found most memorable. All of these are considered in turn, including more specific discussion on topics of attachments to texts; the role of “classics”; and the readers’ paracanon. The study concludes with three main findings: (1) the participating American readers are shown to have rich and diverse memories of literary works, (2) which usually consist of coherent mental representations of the texts accompanied by some sort of episodic memory attaching them to their lived experience, (3) and these representations mostly involve unusual and incongruous characters and plot occurrences set against the ground of narrative content, which might imply that literature is used as a form of simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the ancient world, cities served as physical and conceptual containers to separate a controlled, orderly area from the chaos outside. The depictions of cities in the Hebrew Bible largely underwrite this paradigm. Third Isaiah's vision of Jerusalem, however, imagines a space that challenges these engrained ideas of the urban. Conducting a cognitive ecostylistic analysis and drawing on insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Text World Theory, this article examines the green city as imagined by Third Isaiah (Isaiah 56–66). Throughout the vision, the prophet creates a new (text-) world defined by urban and natural world-builders, a blend that unites seemingly paradoxical elements. The utopian character of future Jerusalem is downplayed by its grounding in the real world (both the discourse-world and its near-equivalent, the empty text-world in which the prophecy is uttered). Third Isaiah calls for a view of city space that draws on the known, dissolving existing dichotomies and categories. As such, it invites modern readers to rethink not only the biblical Jerusalem but also urban space and its relationship to nature more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Miall was, for many scholars, the person welcoming them into the field of empirical literary studies. The research he conducted together with Don Kuiken on the effects of stylistic features on reading, with a central role for (self-modifying) feeling (cf. Miall, David S. & Don Kuiken. 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics 22(5). 389–407) has been the inspirational foundation for much of the research conducted in this and other fields, such as cognitive poetics. By combining methods from traditional literary reading (such as close reading), with methods more commonly used in psychology (such as experimental designs and self-report questionnaires), he gave new depth to the concept of reader response research (Whiteley, Sara & Patricia Canning. 2017. Reader response research in stylistics. Language and Literature 26(2). 71–87), concerning himself with actual readers' testimonials. In honour of David, this paper will present a close reading, not of a literary text, but of a particular reader testimonial, namely an online book review. By applying a close reading informed by Text World Theory, I attempt to show how the social context in which this review was written influenced the expression of narrative absorption the reader experienced during reading. Consequently, I argue for an expansion not just of the methodological toolbox we use to investigate absorption in online social reading, but for an expansion of the concept of story world absorption itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of the racial slurs nigger and negro in Heart of Darkness on readers' perception of dehumanisation, discrimination, and racism. It compares data collected through online questionnaires to test whether the absence or different frequencies of the slurs influence how participants perceive the fictional representation of the African people in the text. Three versions of the same questionnaire are used: one with unmodified passages from Heart of Darkness, one with the same passages but without the racial slurs, and one with the same passages but with more slurs than in the original. Findings show that the absence or overabundance of slurs compared to the original does not alter reader perception of dehumanisation, discrimination, and racism. By comparing the results, this paper makes two interconnected contributions. First, it contributes to the critical discussion about racism in Conrad's novel, by providing evidence on whether the representation of the Africans is perceived as dehumanising, discriminatory, and racist by readers. Second, it offers an empirical perspective on the usefulness of the "sanitising" (removing or substituting of all racial slurs) of literary texts with potential racist implications, adopted by some publishing houses and applied to novels like Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many ecosystems around the world are rapidly deteriorating due to both local and global pressures, and perhaps none so precipitously as coral reefs. Management of coral reefs through maintenance (e.g., marine-protected areas, catchment management to improve water quality), restoration, as well as global and national governmental agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., the 2015 Paris Agreement) is critical for the persistence of coral reefs. Despite these initiatives, the health and abundance of corals reefs are rapidly declining and other solutions will soon be required. We have recently discussed options for using assisted evolution (i.e., selective breeding, assisted gene flow, conditioning or epigenetic programming, and the manipulation of the coral microbiome) as a means to enhance environmental stress tolerance of corals and the success of coral reef restoration efforts. The 2014-2016 global coral bleaching event has sharpened the focus on such interventionist approaches. We highlight the necessity for consideration of alternative (e.g., hybrid) ecosystem states, discuss traits of resilient corals and coral reef ecosystems, and propose a decision tree for incorporating assisted evolution into restoration initiatives to enhance climate resilience of coral reefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]