Immersion

Immersion is the common readerly feeling of being lost in a book, your consciousness transported elsewhere, so that fictional places and people can feel vivid and real. It rests on a familiar human capacity for being completely absorbed by the object whether that is literature, film, gaming, sport, music, theatre, or play. This book contains fourteen explorations of immersion focusing on literary fiction, but also in poetry, song lyric, painting, social media, conspiracy theories, and children’s literature. Immersion is one of the features of literature that is the most powerful, the most valued, and the most compelling aspect of the experience of literary reading.

Author Biography

Naomi Adam is Researcher in literary linguistics at the University of Liverpool and the University of Nottingham. Her research interests span award-winning and/or contemporary fiction, fictolinguistics, narrative ontologies, popular culture and postcolonial fiction. Her work has been published in outlets including English Text Construction, the Journal of Language and Pop Culture, and Language and Literature. She is currently preparing the monograph Metaperspectives in Contemporary Literary Fiction, scheduled for publication in 2026. Naomi is also the Editor of the Poetics and Linguistics Association’s biannual newsletter, Parlance. Jessica Norledge is Assistant Professor in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham. She is a stylistician and discourse analyst with a particular expertise in the cognitive poetics of emotion, and worlds theories in dystopian fiction. She is the author of The Language of Dystopia (2022), and co-author of Digital Pedagogies for Linguistics (2022). She has co-edited Reading Fictional Languages (2024), and is currently working on a book on Contemporary Feminist Stylistics. Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, and a Fellow of the English Association. He has published 20 books and 100 articles in stylistics, sociolinguistics, science fiction and applied linguistics, including Cognitive Poetics (2020), The Language of Surrealism (2017), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and The Poetics of Science Fiction (2000). He co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), The Language and Literature Reader (2008), Contemporary Stylistics (2007) and Impossibility Fiction (1996). His work in cognitive poetics has been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Persian, Russian and Arabic. Matthew Voice is Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick. His research, published in journals including Language and Literature and Discourse Studies, covers topics ranging across military memoir, multiverse fiction, pop song lyrics, and forensic linguistics, all connected through cognitive approaches to language and style. He is currently preparing a contribution to the Cambridge Elements in Cognitive Linguistics series, on the critical and literary analysis of agency in discourse.