ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores phenomena that are consequential upon the remarkable human ability to combine sentences and treat the combined set as a unified whole, with a 'shape' that is, as a text. It explains survey some fundamental ideas and mysteries concerning multi-sentence text, and more particularly multi-sentence narrative text. The book emphasizes the central roles of situation, repetition, and picturing in the reader's making sense of a literary story, and the reader's emotional engagement both drives and draws on these three considerations. Sense-making is a combining of linguistic know-how with other kinds, extending far beyond the words of the text. Repetition is arguably the master scheme of classical rhetoric. Many scholars have recognized the importance of the powerful feelings that art can summon up and perhaps particularly verbal art with its exceptionally developed propositional aspect.
