Architecture as Feeling Engine: Affective Communal Reading of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013)

This article examines how the narrative architectures of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (2013) function as “feeling engines” that engage readers' emotions and interpretive practices. The study proposes the Affective–Communal Reading Framework (ACRF), which integrates theories of affective poetics and reader-response criticism, to compare the two novels' distinct forms Cloud Atlas's nested Matryoshka-like structure and The Luminaries's astrologically-scaled design, and their influence on gap-filling reading habits across interpretive communities. Three research questions guide the analysis: (1) How do Cloud Atlas's nested narratives cue readers' emotional responses and gap-filling processes? (2) How do The Luminaries's astrological form and neo-Victorian conventions affect readers' interpretations and communal reading norms? (3) In what ways can the ACRF illuminate the cooperative role of individual affect and social context in constructing each novel's moral and aesthetic significance? This study argues that both novels, though structurally different, use formal deviation to defamiliarize readers and prompt “felt” shifts in understanding (Miall & Kuiken, 1994, 2002). By drawing on Wolfgang Iser's concept of textual “gaps” and the “wandering viewpoint” of the reader (Iser, 1978) alongside Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities (Fish, 1980), this paper demonstrates that readers' emotional engagement and community-shaped assumptions work in tandem to complete the texts' meanings.