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This book brings together researchers with cognitive-scientific and literary backgrounds to present innovative research in all three variations on the possible interactions between literary studies and cognitive science. The tripartite structure of the volume reflects a more ambitious conception of what cognitive approaches to literature are and could be than is usually encountered, and thus aims both to map out and to advance the field. The first section corresponds to what most people think of as ‘cognitive poetics’ or ‘cognitive literary studies’: the study of literature by literary scholars drawing on cognitive-scientific methods, findings, and/or debates to yield insights into literature. The second section demonstrates that literary scholars need not only make use of cognitive science to study literature, but can also, in a reciprocally interdisciplinary manner, use a cognitively informed perspective on literature to offer benefits back to the cognitive sciences. Finally, the third section, ‘literature in cognitive science’, showcases some of the ways in which literature can be a stimulating object of study and a fertile testing ground for theories and models, not only to literary scholars but also to cognitive scientists, who here engage with some key questions in cognitive literary studies with the benefit of their in-depth scientific knowledge and training.

This book presents an account of the relationships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism. Though readers' and authors' empathy certainly contribute to the emotional resonance of fiction and its success in the marketplace, this book finds the case for altruistic consequences of novel reading inconclusive. It offers instead a detailed theory of narrative empathy, with proposals about its deployment by novelists and its results in readers. The book engages with neuroscience and contemporary psychological research on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies' scrutiny of narrative fiction. Drawing on narrative theory, literary history, philosophy, and contemporary scholarship in discourse processing, the book brings together resources and challenges for the literary study of empathy and the psychological study of fiction reading. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to fiction, but its proper role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been debated for three centuries. The book surveys these debates and offers a series of hypotheses about literary empathy, including narrative techniques inviting empathetic response. It argues that above all readers' perception of a text's fictiveness increases the likelihood of readers' empathy, by releasing readers from their guarded responses to the demands of real others. The book confirms the centrality of narrative empathy as a strategy, as well as a subject, of contemporary novelists. Despite the disrepute of putative human universals, novelists from around the world endorse the notion of shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers' empathy. Consequently, the book suggests, if narrative empathy is to be better understood, women's reading and popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry.

How can literature enhance, parallel or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Or is literature instead limited to the ancillary role of representing cognitive processes? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Beckett’s narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering cognition and mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology (defined as “introspection by simulation”). Through a detailed analysis of Beckett’s entire corpus and published volumes of letters, the book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) “models” for the exploration of core laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind. Marco Bernini integrates models, problems, and interpretive frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett’s modeling practice of a vast array of processes including: the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the hallucinatory quality of inner speech, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the developmental cooperation of language and locomotion, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, the layered complexity of the mind, and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett’s “fictional cognitive models” are transformed into reading, auditory, or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on which the sciences can only discursively or descriptively report. As such, the study advocates for their relevance to the contemporary scientific debate toward an interdisciplinary co-modeling of cognition.

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature is the first anthology exploring human cognition and literature in the context of early modern Spanish culture. It includes the leading voices in the field, along with the main themes and directions that this important area of study has been producing. The book begins with an overview of the cognitive literary studies research that has been taking place within early modern Spanish studies over the last fifteen years. Section II traces the creation of self in the context of the novel, focusing on Cervantes’ Don Quixote in relation to the notions of embodiment and autopoiesis as well as the faculties of memory and imagination as understood in early modernity. Section III illustrates how the concept of embodiment is especially pertinent to delve into the mechanics of the interaction between actors and audience both in the jongleuresque and the comedia traditions. Section IV centers on cognitive theories of perception, the psychology of immersion in fictional worlds, and early modern and modern-day notions of intentionality to discuss the role of perceiving and understanding others in performance, Don Quixote, and courtly conduct manuals. Section V focuses on the affective dimension of audience–performer interactions in the theatrical space of the Spanish corrales and how emotion and empathy can inform new approaches to presenting Las Casas’ work in the literature classroom. The volume closes with an afterword offering strategies to design a course on mind and literature in early modernity.

This book argues that the neoclassical critical tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its cognitive perspective on the workings of literature, constitutes a key chapter in the prehistory of current cognitive approaches to literature. It argues for an understanding of neoclassical criticism as a debate (and not a dogma). As the neoclassical critics considered vraisemblance, that is, the designed mimesis of a work of art, they integrated both cultural and cognitive aspects; this makes them a valuable partner in conversation with today’s cognitive poetics. The continued relevance of the neoclassical rules of poetic justice, the unities, and decorum (as well as their cognitive underpinnings) is illustrated through case studies that trace the explicit and implicit influences which these rules had on the developing narrative shape of the novel in the eighteenth century. These case studies consider canonical novels (such as Pamela, Clarissa, and Tom Jones), their alternative versions (such as Shamela and Anti-Pamela), and works that have recently gathered more critical attention (such as The Female Quixote). It is shown that the neoclassical heritage influenced novels across different modes, including realist and utopian works (such as L’An 2440) as well as Gothic fiction (such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Castle of Otranto).

The early novel developed modes of writing that are considered gripping and immersive, because they foreground physical states, meaningful gestures, and emotional excitement. This monograph shows how these changes relate to “embodied” and “enactive” cognition, “embed” themselves into the cultural and material contexts, and “extend” readers’ thoughts. In an investigation of works from Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces the ways in which such “4E cognition” can contribute to a new perspective on stylistic and narrative changes in eighteenth-century fiction. The embodied dimension of literary language is then related to the media ecologies of letter writing, book learning, and theatricality in the eighteenth century. 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 its embodied experiences. Together with the issue of realism, this book revisits traditional understandings of the “rise of the novel” and earlier historical perspectives in cognitive literary studies. And the perspective from 4E cognition, it is argued, opens links to book history and media ecologies that can launch historically situated cognitive approaches to literature.