MACMILLAN The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture

This book identifies the ‘cognitive humanities’ with new approaches to literature and culture that engage with recent theories of the embodied mind in cognitive science. If cognition should be approached less as a matter of internal representation―a Cartesian inner theatre―than as a form of embodied action, how might cultural representation be rethought? What can literature and culture reveal or challenge about embodied minds? The essays in this book ask what new directions in the humanities open up when the thinking self is understood as a participant in contexts of action, even as extended beyond the skin. Building on cognitive literary studies, but engaging much more extensively with ‘4E’ cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) than previously, the book uses case studies from many different historical settings (such as early modern theatre and digital technologies) and in different media (narrative, art, performance) to explore the embodied mind through culture.  Review “The Cognitive Humanities is an edited collection of eleven essays from across the humanities, including literary studies, linguistics, theatre and performance studies, philosophy and history. … this volume will absolutelty be of value to many medical humanities scholars … .” (Emma Seaber, Centre for Medical Humanities Durham University, centreformedicalhumanities.org, October, 2017) From the Back Cover This book identifies the ‘cognitive humanities’ with new approaches to literature and culture that engage with recent theories of the embodied mind in cognitive science. If cognition should be approached less as a matter of internal representation―a Cartesian inner theatre―than as a form of embodied action, how might cultural representation be rethought? What can literature and culture reveal or challenge about embodied minds? The essays in this book ask what new directions in the humanities open up when the thinking self is understood as a participant in contexts of action, even as extended beyond the skin. Building on cognitive literary studies, but engaging much more extensively with ‘4E’ cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) than previously, the book uses case studies from many different historical settings (such as early modern theatre and digital technologies) and in different media (narrative, art, performance) to explore the embodied mind through culture.  About the Author Peter Garratt is Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. He is a specialist in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and has published on writers such as George Eliot, Dickens and Ruskin, and on topics in cognitive theory and the medical humanities. His first book, Victorian Empiricism, was published in 2010.