Adapted brains and imaginary worlds : cognitive science and the literature of the Renaissance / Donald Beecher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"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.

Cover ; Title; Copyright; Contents; 1 On the Obsessions of Selfhood: Doctor Faustus and the Dramatization of Consciousness; 2 The Biogenesis of Ethics and the Challenge of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; 3 On the Emotional Intentionality of Criminal Protagonists: The Yorkshire Tragedy; 4 On the Systemic Properties of Recollection: Emboxed Narratives and the Limits of Memory in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Thomas North's The Moral Philosophy of Doni; 5 Crying and the Ambiguity of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well.

6 Toward a Cognitive Theory of Proverbs: The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus7 Romance and the Universality of Human Nature: Heliodorus, Aethiopica and Robert Greene, Menaphon; 8 Suspense ... ; 9 Laughter's Shortfall: The Aesthetics of Renaissance Tragicomedy, The Witch of Edmonton and The History of James the Fourth; 10 Cognition, Conversion, and the Patterns of Religious Experience: Francesco Petrarch's Familiar Letters, IV. 1; 11 Folk Psychology and Theory of Mind: John Marston's The Fawn; Notes; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W.

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