Abstract: Considering the role of emotions while reading literary texts, the current research
was designed to investigate first whether or not the participants’ emotional involvement can
improve their comprehension of short stories and second, if emotional involvement while
reading short stories assist students in recognizing literary elements, such as irony, symbol,
theme and foreshadowing. To this end, 79 Persian speakers (30 males and 49 females)
selected from the population of sophomores in one of Iranian Universities participated in the
study. A questionnaire based on Miall and Kuiken’s (2002) categorization of feelings was
designed to assist the students in involving their emotions while reading literary texts. There
were two experimental groups and a control group. Initially, a pretest was assigned to these
groups to ensure that they are homogeneous. The designed questionnaire was employed in
teaching literary texts in experimental groups. At the end of the semester, a posttest was
assigned to all participants. An ANOVA test indicated statistically significant difference
across control and experimental groups in comprehending short stories. The Tukey HSD test
was also applied to investigate where those differences lie. To address the second research
question, a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used; however, MANOVA test
did not show any statistically significant difference across control and experimental groups in
recognizing literary elements.