This book, written from a cognitivist's perspective, deals with the psychology of literary narratives. The present approach is in line with those ecological conceptions of cognitive psychology that make the cognitive processes dependent on the contexts where they take place, conceptions that not only accommodate the "cold," emotionless, analytical cognizing, but also their emotion-driven dynamics, and place cognition into social and cultural context. From a text-processing perspective, the book investigates the hypothesis that literary text processing is part of the more general issues of language processing through a series of empirical studies with Hungarian, European and American short stories.

The book also presents the social-cognitive approach to literary comprehension, which deals with the knowledge that readers mobilize when reading literary narratives. Using a somewhat old-fashioned word, it is content-oriented in the sense that it aims at uncovering how readers interpret the content of the narrative. It can be conceived a kind of empirical hermenautics or empirical constructionism, where the construction of the meaning of a literary narrative is mapped in terms of social knowledge or social representations. [J.L.]