Emotional schemas and cognitive strategies in fiction: Milkman

The present study approaches Anna Burns’s novel Milkman (2018) via the lens of Leahy’s Emotional Schema Therapy (EST) (2019) in order to examine the model’s pros and cons for literary analysis. The study focuses on the protagonist’s emotional schemas which are shaped by her beliefs, interpretations and emotional appraisals of her environment. The analysis is carried out on both textual and extra-textual levels. The textual level focuses on character-society relationships and her emotional responses to the demands of her context. The extra-textual level concerns readers and investigates how the protagonist’s emotional appraisals and interpretations influence readers’ emotional schemas, which in the process of reading become either confirmed or restructured. While textual analysis displays the protagonist’s emotional development, the findings of the extra-textual analysis accentuate the therapeutic role that literary texts can play by addressing readers’ emotional schemas.