This book brings together the study of self-reflective fiction and the contemporary 4E theories of cognition in order to challenge existing cognitive-theoretical models and approaches to literary phenomena. Polvinen presents reflective attention on artifice as an integral part of engagement with fictional narratives, rather than as an external viewpoint that would obscure immersive experiences. The detailed analyses included are both of traditionally metafictional texts by John Barth, A.S. Byatt, Dave Eggers, and Ali Smith, as well as of speculative fictions by Ted Chiang, China Miéville, Christopher Priest, and Catherynne M. Valente. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific issue of fictional cognition: on metaphorical representation, spatiality, temporality, and fictionality. As a whole, the book argues that by combining a literary and theoretically complex view of artifice with the enactive paradigm of perception and imagination, practitioners of cognitive literary studies can further sharpen their own conceptual and terminological apparatus and continue to generate fruitful hermeneutic circulation around the study of the imagination in both the sciences and the humanities. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in cognitive approaches to literary studies, speculative fiction, metafiction, and narrative studies.

When the novel broke into cultural prominence in the eighteenth century, it became notorious for the gripping, immersive style of its narratives. In this book, Karin Kukkonen explores this phenomenon through the embodied style in Eliza Haywood's flamboyant amatory fiction, Charlotte Lennox's work as a cultural broker between Britain and France, Sarah Fielding's experimental novels, and Frances Burney's practice of life-writing and fiction-writing. Four female authors who are often written out of the history of the genre are here foregrounded in a critical account that emphasizes the importance of engaging readers' minds and bodies, and which invites us to revisit our understanding of the rise of the modern novel. Kukkonen's innovative theoretical approach is based on the approach of 4E cognition, which views thinking as profoundly embodied and embedded in social and material contexts, extending into technologies and material devices (such as a pen), and enactive in the inherent links between perceiving the world and moving around in it. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction investigates the eighteenth-century novel through each of these trajectories and shows how language explores its embodied dimension by increasing the descriptions of inner perception, or the bodily gestures around spoken dialogue. The embodied dimension is then related to the media ecologies of letter-writing, book learning, and theatricality. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels 'real' because it is integrated into the lifeworld and embodied experiences. 4E cognition answers one of the central challenges to cognitive literary studies: how to integrate historical and cultural contexts into cognitive approaches.

Using an innovative multidisciplinary approach which is deeply invested in posthumanist thought, this book demonstrates how reading science fiction shapes the way we engage with lived environments. In dialogue with works by widely studied science fiction authors Greg Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer, it draws out how they function as mutant narratives. The first to systematically integrate three fields – feminist posthumanism, cognitive narratology, and science fiction studies – it offers a complex and coherent understanding of readerly experience as material, embodied, dynamic, and imaginative. Covering a range of urgent topics, including climate fiction, New Weird fiction, and new phenomenologies of the body, this book is the first to demonstrate how readerly experience acts as a site for ethical and political reorientation in the time of climate change.

This volume brings together scholarly theories and practices on speculative fiction from the Nordic countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, that are all rooted in similar values, culture, and history yet are independent and unique societies. The book exhibits both the convergences and the diversity of the Nordics in fiction and fandom as well as in research. It traces the roots of Nordic speculative fiction, how it has developed over time, and how the changes in Nordic environments and societies caused by overhanging shared global issues – such as climate change, mass migration, and technological acceleration – find space in speculative practices. The first of its kind, this book allows for deeper insights into the unique characteristics that make Nordic literature and art recognisable and allows for a better understanding of the place of the Nordics within wider global culture systems. The chapters range from literary critiques, film and television studies, creative works by three Nordic creative writers, transcultural text comparisons, and contributions on speculative art to theoretical and methodological discussions on fandom, worldbuilding, and semantics. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this book contributes to connecting Nordic speculative fiction scholarship to the wider global community within the field. It will be of interest to scholars and general enthusiasts of speculative fiction and those with interest in Nordic fiction; film and television studies; literary, culture, or media studies; comparative literature; and cultural history or art-based research.

This book identifies the ‘cognitive humanities’ with new approaches to literature and culture that engage with recent theories of the embodied mind in cognitive science. If cognition should be approached less as a matter of internal representation—a Cartesian inner theatre—than as a form of embodied action, how might cultural representation be rethought? What can literature and culture reveal or challenge about embodied minds? The essays in this book ask what new directions in the humanities open up when the thinking self is understood as a participant in contexts of action, even as extended beyond the skin. Building on cognitive literary studies, but engaging much more extensively with ‘4E’ cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) than previously, the book uses case studies from many different historical settings (such as early modern theatre and digital technologies) and in different media (narrative, art, performance) to explore the embodied mind through culture.

This research collection showcases how kinesic intelligence is fundamental to human communication and our ability to produce complex meaning, exploring its manifestations across a range of humanities disciplines, and connecting our past with our social and cultural future. The book defines kinesic intelligence as a higher-order intellectual competence that allows human beings to interact and grow cognitively and intersubjectively through sensorimotricity and interpersonal movement. Understood in this way, kinesic intelligence can offer insights into the development of humans’ meaning-making abilities and in turn, society and culture more broadly. Recognizing the power of the humanities in furthering sociocultural development, the collection features perspectives from scholars across a range of topics, including the multimodality of language acquisition in children; young adults in clinical psychology and medical humanities; nonverbal communication in history; legal language and reasoning; literature and cognitive studies; the internet and multispecies anthropology; and sensoriality in history and art. Foregrounding the impact of the humanities in promoting new understandings of human intelligence, this volume will be of interest to scholars in cognitive literary studies, multimodality, anthropology, history, medical humanities, and those with an interest in the real-world impact of the humanities.

Transformative Reading belongs to a growing tradition of studies investigating the functions of aesthetic experiences in our lives. Philosophers, literary theorists, and psychologists have suggested that aesthetic experiences implicate and develop our sense of ourselves. Literary texts, as one such experience, challenge readers and extend their imagination by means of complex or deviating plots. Reading literary narrative fiction helps readers develop imaginary selves in a safe way, enhancing their theory of mind. It might also contribute to the development of readers’ interpersonal competencies and foster pro-sociality, altruistic behaviour, and empathy. This book uses empirical research methods to focus on the processes of literary reading, revealing two pathways for the transformative powers of literature. It also reveals how an understanding of these pathways might be beneficial in educational settings – in schools, in the workplace, and in medical contexts.

This book proposes an extension of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) towards a cognitive discourse grammar, through the unique environment that literary stylistic application offers. Drawing upon contemporary research in cognitive stylistics (Text World Theory, deixis and mind-modelling, amongst others), the volume scales up central Cognitive Grammar concepts (such as construal, grounding, the reference point model and action chains) in order to explore the attenuation of experience – and how it is simulated – in literary reading. In particular, it considers a range of contemporary texts by Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. This application builds upon previous work that adopts Cognitive Grammar for literary analysis and provides the first extended account of Cognitive Grammar in contemporary fiction.

This concise volume addresses the question of whether or not language, and its structure in literary discourses, determines individuals’ mental ‘vision,’ employing an innovative cross-disciplinary approach using readers’ drawings of their mental imagery during reading. The book engages in critical dialogue with the perceived wisdom in stylistics rooted in Roger Fowler’s seminal work on deixis and point of view to test whether or not this theory can fully account for what readers see in their mind's eye and how they see it. The work draws on findings from a study of English and Dutch across a range of literary texts, in which participants read literary text fragments and were then asked to immediately draw representations of what they had seen envisioned. Building on the work of Fowler and more recent theoretical and empirical language-based studies in the area, Klomberg, Schilhab and Burke argue that models from embodied cognitive science can help account for anomalies in evidence from readers’ drawings, indicating new ways forward for interdisciplinary understandings of individual meaning construction in literary textual interfaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in stylistics, cognitive psychology, rhetoric, and philosophy, particularly those working in embodied cognition.

Disrupted Intersubjectivity investigates two classes of phenomena creating failures of understanding in social interaction, referred to as 'paralysis' and 'invasion.' Both can be understood as disrupted forms of intersubjectivity, the former being characterized by a lack/deficiency of ways of relating to others, and the latter by an unnecessary surplus. By studying the literary accounts of these phenomena in a selection of Ian McEwan's literary works (“Homemade,” On Chesil Beach, Enduring Love, and Atonement), Andrei Ionescu sheds light on the epistemological potential of literature and the structure of human relationships in general. Part of the developing field of cognitive literary studies, Disrupted Intersubjectivity not only uses cognitive scientific theories in order to clarify literary issues, but also investigates to what extent can literature itself contribute to the process of understanding the workings of the human mind. By investigating the metacognitive issues staged and reflected upon in literary works, Ionescu challenges and refines contemporary cognitive and philosophical approaches to intersubjectivity and opens directions for further theoretical and empirical research.