Bloomsbury Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction (Advances in Stylistics)

This book focuses on how readers can be manipulated during their experience of reading fictional texts. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including detective story, crime fiction, short story, multimodal novel and poetry, the book throws new light into how our perspective on and representation of the world can be manipulated. The chapters adopt a cross-disciplinary perspective and highlight the linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive and multimodal springs of manipulation. They delve into how contemporary fictional works such as The French Lieutenants Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin bring readers to offer a certain type of response, and how their emotions are triggered, their attention controlled and their potential expectations played with. The book also shows how readers responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation of texts as they challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.