Cognitive Spaces and Perspective in Literature

This book brings an original perspective to literary theory and criticism by using insights drawn from visual cognition and neuroscience. Employing recent findings in neuroscience to explain consistent patterns in the representation of space in literature, Finnigan explores how these patterns exploit readers’ power to imagine themselves in different times and places and identifies the literary power of deviating from these patterns. While focusing on Victorian, Modernist and Postmodernist texts, Finnigan brings a new critical framework that can applied in other literary contexts through neuroscience and psychological theory. 

Introduction.-Chapter 1.-Breaking the surface.-Spatial patterning and the Victorian gaze.-Chapter 2.-Terrible Materialities.- Beckett, Language and Vision.-Chapter 3.-Is it a hen or a river.-Episodic Memory and Narrative Production.-Chapter 4.-ChasingRabbits. -Gestalt, Perception and Salience. -Chapter 5.-Embodied Space and Language.- Harmony in Banville and Visual Epiphanies.

Liz Finnigan is Course Director for the English and History Undergraduate Program at Southern Regional College, Northern Ireland. Previously, she taught at Strathclyde University, UK, where she was also the convener of the Advanced Literary Linguistics Research, Editor of the International Journal of Literary Linguistics: Cognitive Edition at Mainz and General Editor of Ecloga. Her research interests are: Literary Linguistics, Cognition, Neuropsychology, Visual Perception, Stylistics and Narrative Theory. However, she has also worked on Irish writing and postcolonial theory. She is currently researching the relationship of narratives to episodic memory.