It is apparent that George Eliot’s novels were heavily engaged with development in natural history; her metaphors made use of and reflected on mid-1800s discussions of evolution and taxonomy. In this essay, research in science history and Eliot studies leads to evidence of how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary s…[Read more]

This is an afterword to Movement in Literature: Exploring Kinesis Intelligence, ed. by Kathryn Banks and Timothy Chesters. (Palgrave 2018). It is intended to advance further work on kinesic intelligence by connection some of what has already been written about how the forms of fiction appeal to what human bodies know about action with what can be…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction in Spanish, an edition of the original Castilian text with facing modernization and notes in Spanish, and a short bibliography.

This unit contains a selection of texts from the Sendebar (1253), one of the most famous and widespread collections of exemplary literature in the Middle Ages, with versions in…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction in English, an edition of the original Castilian text with facing English translation and notes, and a short bibliography.

This unit contains a selection of texts from the Sendebar (1253), one of the most famous and widespread collections of exemplary literature in the Middle Ages, with versions in…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction (Spanish), edition of the original Castilian text with facing modernization and notes in Spanish, and a short bibliography.

The text is the first modernization of the medieval Castilian of Ferrán Martínez’s speech at the royal court in Seville in 1388. Martínez was a canon at the Cathedral Chapter and th…[Read more]

This unit contains a brief introduction (English), edition of the original Castilian text with facing English translation and notes, and a short bibliography.

The text is the first English translation from the medieval Castilian of Ferrán Martínez’s speech at the royal court in Seville in 1388. Martínez was a canon at the Cathedral Chapter an…[Read more]

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to…[Read more]

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]

This essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably…[Read more]

The pastoral genre provides cognitive literary historians a clear example of how genre cooperates with and enacts the most basic cognitive tasks of the imagination, namely the ability to toggle between concrete sense data and abstractions. This essay discusses the predictive processing hypothesis and suggest that it offers a usefully revisionary…[Read more]

In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies” (2015). Scholars from m…[Read more]

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with modern Spanish introduction, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an introduction…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with modern Spanish introduction, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an introduction…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with English introduction, translation, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an…[Read more]

This is a pedagogical edition of the medieval Castilian texts with English introduction, translation, notes, and bibliography by Ana Gómez Bravo, of a series of excerpts of late fifteenth-century texts related to the cultural practices (perceived and actual) of judeo-conversos, or Jews who have converted to Christianity. It includes an…[Read more]

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]