Wednesday, December 24, 2008
21: A New Online Critical Journal
The launch yesterday of 21, a new online critical journal from Edge Hill University, edited by Ailsa Cox and Rob Spence and concerned with contemporary and innovative fiction. Among the articles I haven't yet read is one on post 9/11 fiction, and those I have are a revealing interview with writer Charles Lambert and an interesting piece on the issue of collecting short stories in volumes by Ailsa Cox (instigator of the Edge Hill Prize for short story collections), including a report on a recent linked conference. There's also an article by me on the critical response to Anne Enright's The Gathering and its implications for the way we read now and the contemporary status of fiction.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
"Why we read fiction", Zunshine, Ohio State UP
Work by Mar, Oatley and Djikic
I wonder if our responses to books have shifted because of slight changes in the reasons for reading. In "the psychologist", V21 No12 (dec 2008) there's an article the effects of reading fiction. It's suggested in "Why we read fiction", (by L.Zunshine, Ohio State UP) that fiction is a kind of simulation (used in the way that pilots use a flight simulator). Experiments suggest that reading fiction can have short-term psychological effects,
("After being given either fiction or non-fiction from the New Yorker, those who read the fiction piece scored higher on a test of social reasoning"!). Perhaps people like realism and/or fiction containing people they'd like to identify with simply because it's more "useful" to them.
Interesting, Tim
Post a Comment