In this fresh and often playful interdisciplinary study, Lisa Zunshine presents a fluid
discussion of how key concepts from cognitive science complicate our cultural …

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary
history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For over four …

The essays gathered here demonstrate and justify the excitement and promise of cognitive
historicism, providing a lively introduction to this new and quickly growing area of literary …

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy
Easterlin demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new …

Until recently, scientific and literary cultures have existed side-by-side but most often in
parallel universes, without connection. The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and …

Drawing on the explosion of academic and public interest in cognitive science in the past
two decades, this volume features articles that combine literary and cultural analysis with …

What is the function and value of fiction? Debates over these questions involve
considerations that range from aesthetics to ethics, from the intrin sic values of the genre to …

? We tell ourselves stories in order to live,? Joan Didion observed in The White Album. Why
is this? Michael Austin asks, in Useful Fictions. Why, in particular, are human beings, whose …

Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories and how our minds are shaped to understand them.
After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer's Odyssey and Dr. Seuss's …

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies
may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying …