A Corpus Linguistic Analysis The observation that individuals who read more have better verbal abilities is among one of the most robust findings in reading research. For example, a meta-analysis of 99 studies revealed moderate to strong correlations between reading, measured as lifetime print-exposure several different indices of linguistic competence (Mol & Bus, 2011). (As with all correlatio...

John Cleland’s 1740s pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure repeatedly depicts and eroticises the act of defloration. As such it is a revealing illustration of what Ivan Bloch termed the ‘defloration mania’ of the eighteenth century. This article maps narrative events on to contemporary medical depictions of first intercourse to show the ways that the theories and ideas presented in...

John Cleland's 1740s pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure repeatedly depicts and eroticises the act of defloration. As such it is a revealing illustration of what Ivan Bloch termed the 'defloration mania' of the eighteenth century. This article maps narrative events on to contemporary medical depictions of first intercourse to show the ways that the theories and ideas presented in...

Fiction can be a means of striving towards truths, but in a way that is more abstract than the truths of everyday happenings. We offer a staircase of evolutionary pre-adaptations on which works of literature such as novels and plays depend. These include systems of mirror-neurons, mimetic ritual, conversational language based on actions, narrative structure, metaphor, and imaginary play. These ...

This article analyses Jamaica Kincaid’s autobiographical novel See Now Then through the metaphor of palimpsest with aim exploring frictions between different generic and thematic layers that make up text. It argues despite novel’s openness, its concerns, most notably treatment time narrative temporality, encourage a backward-looking stance reasserts past. The theories Sarah Dillon Lene Johannes...

This article explores the interaction of verbal and visual art in Virginia Woolf’s fiction, exemplified by her novel, To Lighthouse. The narrative novel not only features scenes painting Ramsays’ portrait, but it unfolds as creative process advances concludes with Lily’s final stroke brush. While words are used to enact creation, serves both a frame basis for verbal. synergistic movement storyt...