Engaging Readers Cognitively and Affectively in Flash Fiction

This article sets out to explore flash fiction, understood as very short forms of prose narrative and taking it to be a mode of writing that only properly developed in recent decades, although not without prominent antecedents going back through centuries of literary history. It addresses the issues of defining flash fiction, as well as its formal features, outlining their typical structures as well as speculating on how flash fiction may engage readers in its own characteristic ways. I argue that while retaining the basics of narrative requirements, such as representing events and being able to generate mental representations of storyworlds, flash fictions chiefly relies on undernarration and fragmentation, narrating in insufficient detail. This requires readers, despite flash fiction’s brevity, to be constantly cognitively challenged, as well as to experience highly condensed and intense epistemic narrative emotions.