“How does the text capture the reader’s attention or interest? How does it provide aesthetic appeal and trigger powerful emotions? In other words, how do specific stylistic features shape reader’s responses?”
The Powerful Literary Fiction Texts Network founded in 2019 by Victoria Pöhls and Mariane Utudji hosted two conferences (Brighton 2019, and Paris Online 2020) to answer those very questions from a literary and linguistics viewpoint. From those events emerged the edited collection Powerful Prose: How Textual Features Impact Readers which was published by Transcript on September 30th, 2021.
If you are curious about what makes literary prose powerful, you can access the open access book here and offer your review below. You can also tell us what you think makes the reading process so powerful when we are absorbed by literary prose.