What Do We Do with Narratives after the Fact? Exploring Dimensions of Retrospective Imaginative Involvement

Retrospective imaginative involvement (RII) describes people's asynchronous cognitive involvement with a narrative. Accordingly, RII focuses on what people do with narratives (and how they think about them) after the original story has ended. RII is conceptualized in keeping with the model of narrative comprehension and engagement and the theory of expanding boundaries of the self. The current paper explores the implications of these theories for RII by looking at RII in relation to characters, events, universe, and backstory. The results demonstrate that RII is a multifaceted construct that can be applied to numerous narrative elements.