Iconicity in literature

Abstract Iconicity in literature involves the iconic potential of signs to make a poem or a text come alive, allowing us to move inside a literary landscape and empathize with its literary characters. But how does iconicity in literary texts function and how can we examine and account for it? Focusing on how the icon’s subdivision into images, diagrams, and metaphors interacts in literary texts and what this means for the reading experience, this contribution further looks at the cognitive functions of mirror symmetries and chiasmus as they occur on all levels of texts—sounds and graphemes, words, sentences, lines, chapters, and entire books, as well as on the narrative and conceptual level. It also gives an overview of the steadily growing body of research into the vital functions of iconicity in literature and shows how an understanding of the iconic dimensions of literary texts is essential to exploring the myriad ways iconicity permeates the work of art.