Alfonsina Scarinzi examines the function of themes as fundamental building blocks of fictional literature. The study of themes occupies a position at the intersection of the humanities and cognitive sciences due to its extraliterary, transmissible, and cross-cultural nature. The author argues that a theme in literature, as a cognitive-emotional construct, creates a bridge between the fictional world of the text and the non-fictional world of the reader during text processing. In the book, she discusses how manifestness, interest arousal, defamiliarization, meaning maximization, and trial actions influence thematic information selection. As cognitive-emotional and stylistic means, they serve the function of establishing a literary-relevant hierarchy composed of a main theme and various sub-themes.