ABSTRACT
From its inception, the study of literature and the environment has been interested in how ecologically oriented texts represent and provoke emotions in relation to the natural world. This chapter argues that the concept of liberated embodied simulation can help us better understand how literary texts engage readers emotionally in their narrative environments. To this purpose, it differentiates between emotions that a text might cue directly in relation to the depicted storyworld and empathetic character emotions, which allow readers to feel along with the people who populate the storyworld and are thus physically exposed to it. The chapter explores these issues in relation to a widely read climate change novel, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, combining narratological analysis with the insights gained from a published survey of readers of the novel.
