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. He was captured by a vampire society and committed suicide. Set after an outbreak of a viral plague that turns both living and dead into creatures resembling vampires, the plot follows Last of His Kind Robert Neville. Robert Neville is the sole survivor of an outbreak of Vampiris. 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. 'On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.' A 1954 novel by Richard Matheson. 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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