Cognition, Emotion and Consciousness in Modernist Storyworlds

This volume brings together contributions from scholars across the globe interested in the representation of embodied minds in literary texts, ranging from George Eliot to Hilary Mantel. It focuses specifically on the experimental formalism of canonical modernism, as well as on innovative works in literary history which interface with avant-garde poetics. Approaching textual aspects such as time and space, character, gender, the social mind and readers’ participation through the parameters of cognition, emotion and consciousness, the contributions here will broaden the reader’s understanding of the nexus between mind and narrative, as well as of how the modernist aesthetic enriches the conditions of that nexus.

Significantly, the book also collectively illustrates how experientiality, considered by many narratologists to be equal to narrativity, to the very ontology of narrative, remains a cross-generic phenomenon, an inherent feature of poetry and documentary reporting no less than of the novel proper.