Books in the Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance series

Restoring the Human Context to Literary and Performance Studies argues that much of contemporary literary theory is still predicated, at least implicitly, on outdated linguistic and psychological models such as post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism, which significantly contradict current dominant scientific views.

This book argues for the adaptive function of storytelling, integrates traditional humanist scholarship with current knowledge about the evolved and adapted human mind, and calls for literary scholars to reframe their interpretation of the first authors who responded to Darwin.

This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various political regimes in our species' history.

Kinaesthesia and Visual Self-reflection in Contemporary Dance features interviews with UK-based professional-level contemporary, ballet, hip hop, and breaking dancers and cross-disciplinary explication of kinaesthesia and visual self-reflection discourses.

Cognitive theory provides a wealth of new ideas that illuminate Shakespeare, even as he illuminates them, and the theory of blending, or conceptual integration, strikingly corroborates and amplifies both classic and current insights of literary criticism.

This book explores how minds at the movies understand minds in the movies and introduces readers to some fundamental principles of Cognitive Studies-namely conceptual blending, Theory of Mind, and empathy/perspective-taking-through their application to film analysis.

In the first in-depth study of the emotional dimensions of Du Bois's and Emerson's writings on public intellectualism, reform, and race, Schneider offers a valuable and eloquent contribution to the critical tradition.

How is performer-object interaction enacted and perceived in the theatre? How thereby are varieties of 'meaning' also enacted and perceived? Using cognitive theory and ecological ontology, Paavolainen investigates how the interplay of actors and objects affords a degree of enjoyment and understanding, whether or not the viewer speaks the language.

Investigations into how the brain actually works have led to remarkable discoveries and these findings carry profound implications for interpreting literature. This study applies recent breakthroughs from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology in order to deepen our understanding of John Donne's Songs and Sonnets.

This book helps to bridge the gap between science and literary scholarship. Building on findings in the evolutionary human sciences, the authors construct a model of human nature in order to illuminate the evolved psychology that shapes the organization of characters in nineteenth-century British novels, from Jane Austen to E. M. Forster.

Using Hamlet and a number of other popular and influential seventeenth-century tragedies as case-studies, this book shows how aesthetic experience can help organize the biological functions of our brains into adaptive social networks.

Early modern playing companies performed up to six different plays a week and mounted new plays frequently. This book seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: how did they do it? Drawing upon work in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, it proposes that the cognitive work of theatre is distributed across body, brain, and world.

Using Shakespeare's Hamlet as a test subject and cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual blending as a tool, Cook unravels the 'mirror held up to nature' at the center of Shakespeare's play and provides a methodology for applying cognitive science to the study of drama.

In Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture, Jill Stevenson uses cognitive theory to explore the layperson s physical encounter with live religious performances, and to argue that laypeople s interactions with other devotional media - such as books and art objects - may also have functioned like performance events.

This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies.

This book investigates how writers and readers of Renaissance literature deployed 'kinesic intelligence', a combination of pre-reflective bodily response and reflective interpretation.

Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare's Characters brings cognitive science to Shakespeare, applying contemporary theories of mindreading to Shakespeare's construction of character.

This book examines how early modern and recently emerging theories of consciousness and cognitive science help us to re-imagine our engagements with Shakespeare in text and performance. Papers investigate the connections between states of mind, emotion, and sensation that constitute consciousness and the conditions of reception in our past and present encounters with Shakespeare's works. Acknowledging previous work on inwardness, self, self-consciousness, embodied self, emotions, character, and the mind-body problem, contributors consider consciousness from multiple new perspectives-as a phenomenological process, a materially determined product, a neurologically mediated reaction, or an internally synthesized identity-approaching Shakespeare's plays and associated cultural practices in surprising and innovative ways.

This book is about the centrality of movement, movement perception, and kinesthetic experience to theatrical spectatorship.

This collection is the first book-length study to re-evaluate all of James Joyce's major fictional works through the lens of cognitive studies.

This book investigates how writers and readers of Renaissance literature deployed 'kinesic intelligence', a combination of pre-reflective bodily response and reflective interpretation.

Narratives of possession have survived in early English medical and philosophical treatises. Using ideas derived from cognitive science, this study moves through the stages of possession and exorcism to describe how the social, religious, and medical were internalized to create the varied manifestations of demon possession in early modern England.

This book examines how early modern and recently emerging theories of consciousness and cognitive science help us to re-imagine our engagements with Shakespeare in text and performance. Papers investigate the connections between states of mind, emotion, and sensation that constitute consciousness and the conditions of reception in our past and present encounters with Shakespeare¿s works. Acknowledging previous work on inwardness, self, self-consciousness, embodied self, emotions, character, and the mind-body problem, contributors consider consciousness from multiple new perspectives¿as a phenomenological process, a materially determined product, a neurologically mediated reaction, or an internally synthesized identity¿approaching Shakespeare¿s plays and associated cultural practices in surprising and innovative ways.