Border Crossing and Reader Reception in "The Emperor's Babe", "Mr. Loverman" and "Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernardine Evaristo

Master's Thesis from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Freiburg (English Department), language: English, abstract: This paper uses both distant and close reading methods to analyse reader reception of Bernardine Evaristo's works "The Emperor's Babe", "Mr. Loverman" and her Booker Award winning publication "Girl, Woman, Other". Through experimental form and style, approachable characters and humorous style of writing, Evaristo successfully draws the contemporary reader into the story world and educates her on the constructedness of cognitive borders and social categorizations (sex, gender, age, race, class et cetera). After the reader crosses the border into the story world, she follows the individual journeys of the fictional characters with the help of mind-reading and narrative empathy and leaves the story world with differences in cognitive processing" followed by effects on "cognition, perception and action.To empirically analyse the educational, border-crossing effect of a literary work that reaches beyond the reading experience, this paper uses reception data from Goodreads in the form of reader profile information and reviews on "The Emperor's Babe", "Mr. Loverman" and "Girl, Woman, Other". After a theoretical introduction to the historic development of the academic interest in both border and (empirical) reception studies, the results section will outline the major findings of a descriptive statistical analysis of the retrieved data for the reception of all novels. Each novel's reception will then be looked at individually through distant and close reading of the respective book's narrative techniques. A discussion section will compare the findings of the distant and close readings of all…