A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

Roll over image to zoom in Click on image to zoom

A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

Name: A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation
Brand: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9781421404721
Price: 152.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9781421404721

Price:

$152.00

Stock:

Out of Stock - Available to backorder

Quantity:

By Nancy Easterlin
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: May 1, 2012
Format: HARDBACK
Pages: 336

Share this product

Button Actions

Please copy the ISBN for submitting review copy form

Combining cognitive and evolutionary research with traditional humanist methods, Nancy Easterlin here demonstrates how a biocultural perspective in theory and criticism opens up new possibilities for literary interpretation.Easterlin maintains that the goal of literary interpretation is still of central intellectual and social value. Taking an open yet judicious approach, she argues, however, that literary interpretation stands to gain dramatically from a fair-minded and creative application of cognitive and evolutionary research. This work does just that, expounding a biocultural method that charts a middle course between overly reductive approaches to literature and traditionalists who see the sciences as a threat to the humanities.Easterlin applies her biocultural method to four major subfields within literary studies: new historicism, ecocriticism, cognitive approaches, and evolutionary approaches. After a thorough review of each subfield, she reconsiders it in light of relevant research in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and provides a textual analysis of literary works from the romantic era to the present, including William Wordsworth's 'Simon Lee' and the Lucy poems, Mary Robinson's 'Old Barnard,' Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode,' D. H. Lawrence's The Fox, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Raymond Carver's 'I Could See the Smallest Things.' A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation offers a fresh and reasoned approach to literary studies that at once preserves the central importance that interpretation plays in the humanities and embraces the exciting developments of the cognitive sciences.

Preface
1. Literature, Science, and Biocultural Interpretation
Literature and Science?
The Emergence of ""English"" and the Two Cultures
What Is Consilience?
The ""Unimaginable Complexity"" of Interpretation
The Centrality of Interpretation: Glimpsing Knowledge
Are Art and Literature Adaptations?
What Is Literature For?
2. ""It Is No Tale"": Narrative, Aesthetics, and Ideology
Aesthetics under the Sign of Ideology
Narrative Knowing and Epistemic Constraints
Cognition, Modernization, and Aesthetic Transformation
Unknowing the Narrative Habit: Wordsworthian Configurations
Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tale
3. Minding Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinders and Natural Places
Mental Maps for Critical Footpaths
Constructing Minds
Constructing Environment
Constructing Place
Literary Constructions of Nature, Place, and Environment
No Place: Wide Sargasso Sea and Psychic Displacement
4. Remembering the Body: Feelings, Concepts, Process
Cognitivism in the Matrix of Experience
Multiple Cognitions
From Cognitive Rhetoric to Conceptual Blending
Cognition, Consciousness, and the Modern Mind
In the Literary Matrix: Cognitive Ecological Process
Vines and Vipers: Re-regulation in Coleridge's ""Dejection""
Shrinking the Self: ""I Could See the Smallest Things""
5. Endangered Daughters: Sex, Mating, and Power in Darwinian Feminist Perspective
The Emergence of Darwinian Literary Criticism
Whose Life History?
Wuthering Heights and the Social Emotions
Inbreeding Depression and Romantic Incest
Mating Strategies, Monogamy, and Sexual Equality
Quarry or Wife? The Proprietary Male and Relational Possibility in The Fox
Notes
Bibliography
Index

""There is much to admire in Easterlin's extraordinary synthesis of biocultural literary approaches; anyone working in the field as student or researcher will get a great deal of intellectual stimulation from her text.""

A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation

Request Academic Copy

Description

You may also like

Recently viewed