Reading beyond the lines: A critical review of cognitive approaches to literary interpretation and comprehension

Reading literature requires not only understanding the literal meaning of the text, but also constructing a nonliteral interpretation of the text’s deeper meaning yet little is known about the psychological processes involved when interpretations are constructed. The current paper presents a review of the extant work from literary theory, empirical studies of literature, and research from more general cognitive text comprehension to explore the conditions under which literary interpretations are made and what this discipline-specific reading behavior can tell us about more general text comprehension.