Immersing Readers in the Text-worlds of Anxious People

While immersion has been extensively studied in multimedia contexts like videogaming, its exploration in the context of written fiction is relatively new. This paper examines the role of immersive phenomena in determining the success of the novel Anxious People (2019), which, in fact, readers have often described as highly immersive. We propose that the sense of immersion experienced and reported by readers results from a combination of at least three factors: 1) a ‘textual architecture’ that requires continuous text-world-switches in the readers’ mind, fostering curiosity; 2) the presence of ‘empathic mechanisms’ produced by switches in text-worlds and storyworlds that introduce different versions of the same characters at crucial moments; and 3) the systematic ‘projection of the reader’ achieved through strategic use of second-person pronouns and the inclusive ‘we’. This case study aims to demonstrate that a reader’s sense of ‘immersion’ in fiction often arises from a combination of various narrative choices rather than isolated stylistic patterns.