Book

Adapted brains and imaginary worlds : cognitive science and the literature of the Renaissance

Beecher, Donald, author

Overview

\"The literary discipline is based on principles of structure and language, is concerned with interpreting the emotions in characters comprising humanity in all its variety reacting to the provocations of their imaginary worlds, and encompasses our cognitive and affective reactions to those representations. So much of what we take from reading, though, is not linked to language: linguistic prompts merely set in motion the associations, memories, and images through which we generate meaning and emotionalize experience. Reading, if it is to understand how and why our minds complete fictive worlds, must take an interest in what the emotions are, where they originate, and what they are for. The cognitive sciences offer valuable perspectives on the feeling brain, perspectives which reveal much about the emotions of imaginary persons and the feelings they arouse in readers. This work aims to connect textual interpretation and brain science. In so doing, it furthers the understanding of literary experience and opens up new approaches to literature in general through philosophical insights into the human brain. Each of the book's eleven chapters sets out to bring a relevant cognitive perspective into the spotlight: memory, the emotions, the self, intentionality, laughter, crying, conversion experience, the psychology of suspense, criminal deviancy, binary ethics--the narrative brain in perceptual and imaginative modes--by analyzing these experiences and emotions in relevant works of Renaissance literature. The texts are both minor but characteristic and canonical, from The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus and The Moral Philosophy of Doni, to Spenser's Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure.\"-- Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Subject: 1500-1700 / English literature Early modern, 1500-1700 History and criticism. / Cognition in literature. / Emotions in literature. / Memory in literature. / Self in literature. / Cognitive science. / English literature Early modern.
• ISBN: 9780773546806, 0773546804, 9780773546813, 0773546812

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PR428.P76 B44 2016	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE