Stories, Meaning, and Experience: Narrativity and Enaction

This book presents a complete reconsideration of the nature of narrative organization developed in the framework of a new and comprehensive approach to cognitive science: enaction. This new paradigm offers an understanding of human cognition based in the perception and sensory motor dynamics of an agent and a world. It argues that narrative is but one form of conceptual organization for human minds, the other being categorical organization.

The focus of this volume is the intersection and the cross-fertilization between the travel narrative, literary discourse, and the New Philosophy in the early modern to early eighteenth-century historical periods. Contributors examine how, in an historical era which realized an emphasis on nation and during a time when exploration was laying the foundation for empire, science and the literary discourse of the travel narrative become intrinsically linked.

Author and Narrator: Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological (Linguae & Litterae)

The distinction between author and narrator is one of the cornerstones of narrative theory. In the past two decades, however, scope, implications and consequences of this distinction have become the subjects of debate. This volume offers contributions to these debates from different vantage points: literary studies, linguistics, philosophy, and media studies. It thus manifests the status of narrative theory as a transdisciplinary project.

Human beings have constantly told stories, presented events and placed the world into narrative form. This activity suggests a very basic way of looking at the world, yet, this book argues, even the most seemingly simple of stories is embedded in a complex network of relations. Paul Cobley traces these relations, considering the ways in which humans have employed narrative over the centuries to ‘re-present’ time, space and identity.

Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950: Constellations of the Soul

This book studies literary epiphany as a modality of character in the British and American novel. Epiphany presents a significant alternative to traditional models of linking the eye, the mind, and subject formation, an alternative that consistently attracts the language of spirituality, even in anti-supernatural texts. This book analyzes how these epiphanies become "spiritual" and how both character and narrative shape themselves like constellations around such moments.