I am legend victorian monsters1/19/2024 This story is a classic vampire tale, originally published in 1954, that tells the story of Robert Neville, who may or may not be the last human on earth. And so will spoilers, just so you know! So let’s begin with a super classic: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. I’m sure plenty of ranting on both wonderful and terrible things will still occur. Dishing on horror isn’t really new to this blog (see my rant on creepy mannequins), but I’ll be getting a little more in depth with some of these stories. Finally, I suggest that the limited mind attribution for the vampires invited through their construal contributes to the presentation of a ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977) for this character.Hi gang! This is the first of a series of horror-related posts I’ll be doing for my Reading In Genre: Horror Monsters course for Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. Drawing on online reader responses to the novel, I argue that readers’ understanding of these other minds plays an important role in their empathetic experience and ethical judgement of the novel’s main character and focaliser, Robert Neville. In my analysis, I suggest that readers’ attribution of mental-states to the vampires in Matheson’s novel is strategically limited through a number of choices in their linguistic construal. I draw upon empirical research into ‘mind attribution’ in social psychology, and apply Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), and its notion of ‘construal’, as a framework for the application of such findings to narrative. In this article, I explore the application of such research to the minds constructed for the vampire characters in Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction/horror novel I Am Legend. For Palmer (2004, 2010), and other proponents of a cognitive narratology, research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences provides insights into readers’ experiences of fictional minds.
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