Processes and products of readers’ journeys to narrative worlds

In this article, I use the metaphor that readers journey to narrative worlds to review research that has spanned my career. In the first section, I consider the processes that enable readers to undertake these journeys as well as the processes that allow them to participate in the narrative worlds once they have arrived. In the second section, I review research that supports claims that readers’ journeys to narrative worlds create distance from their worlds of origin. In the final section, I consider research that documents fundamental ways in which readers’ real-world beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are changed by their experiences of narrative worlds.