Immersion: The Experience of Literary Reading

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.