Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance (word, clause, phrase, phoneme, etc.)
Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language[6] (phonology, graphology, morphology, lexis, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics).
[7] The Prague Structuralists' work was a continuation of the ideas generated by the Russian Formalists, particularly their notion of Defamiliarization ('ostranenie').
Especially the 1917 essay 'Art as Technique' (Iskusstvo kak priem) by Viktor Shklovsky proved to be highly influential in laying the basis of an anthropological theory of literature.
It took several decades before the Russian Formalists' work was discovered in the West, but in 1960 some British stylisticians, notably Geoffrey Leech and Roger Fowler, established the notion of 'foregrounding' in the linguistically oriented analysis of literature.
Soon a plethora of studies investigated foregrounding features in a multitude of texts, demonstrating its ubiquity in a large variety of literary traditions.
Sentences that had more foregrounding devices were found to be judged by readers as more striking, more emotional, and they also lead to slower reading times.
Foregrounding also appears to play some role in increasing empathic understanding for people in similar situations as the characters in a story they just read.