This study examines how reading habits affect people’s sensitivity to word distributions in literary and non-literary writing. We manipulated eight literary and non-literary passages, creating modified versions that had lower word chunk frequencies but higher individual word frequencies than the originals. Subjects were then asked to rate the passages’ quality of writing. Results showed that su...

22 English Journal 99.4 (2010): 22–29 by a variety of new terms such as literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and documentary narrative. What distinguished these writings from conventional factual and informational texts was that they were not only well-researched accounts of real events or experiences but also artful narratives. They employed literary techniques borrowed from modern and po...

Contributing to research on social processes of cultural de-hierchization, this article explores how critical recognition in elite newspapers is related to the recognition that authors receive from other agents in the literary field in the past half-century. We distinguish four types of institutional recognition: (a) long-term recognition in literary encyclopedias, (b) short-term recognition th...

In his article "A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America," Mario J. Valdés addresses the well-recognized limitations of literary history as historical research. Valdés outlines the theoretical thinking that has guided the editors of The Oxford Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures to plan, organize, and complete the fi...

In his article "Western Canon literature, book series, textbooks used in literary departments, of the situation of Western canons cated process when establishing their roles in particular, by market mechanism ties. He posits that in the age of globali lished between Western literary canons and Chinese readership and scholarship. The publishing ma ket, national policy, and educational institutio...

In his article, "Literary Careers: Breaks and Stalls," W. Ray Crozier argues that biographical evidence points to considerable individual variation in writers' output over the life span even when allowance is made for longevity and length of writing career. This issue has been neglected by psychological accounts of creativity. Crozier outlines a theoretical framework for understanding variation...

This article reports on case-study research which explored English as a second language (ESL) learners’ perceptions of the role played by the literary cloze activity in the development of their language and literary awareness. The subjects, four students from a variety of language, culturaland literarybackgrounds, attended a semester-long university ESL subject which adopted a language-based ap...