Willie van Peer

Willie van Peer is professor emeritus in the Department of Literature and Intercultural Hermeneutics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany.[1] He is a linguist, literary scholar, and one of the founders of the empirical study of literature. Van Peer has published extensively in his main areas of research: foregrounding,[2][3][4][5][6] narratology,[7] literary evaluation,[8][9][10][11] literary theory[12] and emotion in literature.[13][14][15][16] Van Peer was Vice President of the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA, 1996–1998), Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA, 2000–2003) and President of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL, 2004-2006). He was (co-)editor of the series Linguistic Approaches to Literature (2000–2010) and founder of Scientific Study of Literature (2011). Directions in Empirical Literary Studies was published in his honour in 2008.

Van Peer’s PhD and the book Stylistics and Psychology. Investigations of Foregrounding (1986) was the first attempt to empirically validate the concept of foregrounding, originally developed by the Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists.