Foregrounding

One major research area in the empirical study of literature pertains to the role of foregrounding (i. e., stylistic deviations and parallelism) in the reading process. The associated phenomena are arguably key to understanding what distinguishes literary reading and essential for the investigation of its impact on readers’ interpretation and aesthetic appreciation. We trace the origins of the concept back to Aristotle and follow various theoretical elaborations in the works of twentieth-century literary scholars and linguists, right up to the moment when developments took an empirical turn. We will see that the original scholarly assumptions were inspiration for an impressive amount of qualitative (e. g., think-aloud studies and in-depth interviews) and quantitative (e. g., experiments, neurocognitive studies) research. The results have deepened our insights about the way textual foregrounding affects readers’ experiences and how these experiences may be associated with carry-over effects (e. g., critical thinking abilities). Besides the state of the art in all the relevant lines of research, we offer readers a comprehensive overview of the many remaining problems that require further (perhaps interdisciplinary) study.