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.

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.

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.

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.

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.