Books in the Cognition and Poetics series

Patrick Colm Hogan, a leading theorist of cognitive cultural studies, offers the first cognitive cultural study of identity in sex, sexuality, and gender. With precise conceptual distinctions, wide-ranging citation of empirical research, and careful explication of diverse literary works, Hogan defends a systematic skepticism about gender differences and a view of sexuality as evolved but also contingent and variable.

The Poem as Icon resolves long-standing questions of poetic function from a cognitive perspective. Margaret Freeman shows how poetry, as one expression of the aesthetic faculty, enables us to iconically access and experience the "being" of reality.

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.

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.

Carrying neoclassicism back into today's critical debates, this study considers the cognitive underpinnings of the rules of poetic justice, the unities and decorum, underlines their relevance for today's cognitive poetics and traces their influence in the emerging narrative form of the eighteenth-century novel.

Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils contrasts two approaches to poetic conventions: the "culture-begets-culture" or "influence-hunting" approach, which traces conventions back to earlier cultural phenomena by mapping out their migrations; and the "constraints-seeking" or "cognitive-fossils" approach, that assumes that conventions originate in cognitive solutions to adaptation problems.

Expressive Minds and Artistic Creations: Studies in Cognitive Poetics presents multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research papers describing new developments in the field of cognitive poetics. Among other leading researchers, many contributors are world-famous scholars of psychology, linguistics, and literature, including Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Zoltan Koevecses, and Reuven Tsur.

Through study of female writers of the eighteenth-century novel, Kukkonen explores how literary texts draw on embodied experience and the lived reality of literature and reading. She approaches embodied style through the approach of 4E cognition, which understands the mind as embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive in the environment. The work breaks new ground in showing the promise of 4E cognition for cognitive poetics, and how the fiction-writing developsdiverse repertoires of embodied language for the history of the novel.

Drawing on recent psychological research, this book proposes a new and clear definition of "style" and provides a systematic theoretical account of style in relation to cognitive and affective science. Patrick Hogan uses rich examples from literature, film, and graphic fiction to explain the narrative, thematic, and emotional functions of style in narrative.