ASPECTS OF LITERARY RESPONSE - A NEW QUESTIONNAIRE

A newly developed instrument, the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ ), provides scales that measure seven different aspects of readers' or ientation toward literary texts: Insight, Empathy, Imagery Vividness, Leisure Escape, Concern with Author, Story-Driven Reading, and Rejecti on of Literary Values. The present report presents evidence that each of these scales possesses satisfactory internal consistency, retest re liability, and factorial validity. Also, a series of five studies prov ided preliminary evidence that each scale may be located in a theoreti cally plausible network of relations with certain global personality t raits (e.g., Absorption), with aspects of cognitive style (e.g., Regre ssion in the Service of the Ego), and with some of the learning skills that are relevant to effective work in the classroom (e.g., Elaborati ve Processing). In a variety of teaching and research settings, the LR Q may be a useful measure of individual differences in readers' orient ation toward literary texts.