Cirrus@Austlit

'On the back of his latest edited collection of Australian cognitive literary criticism, Jean-François Vernay has produced his own contribution to the field, Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness (2021). Both in his literature review and his own analyses, Vernay paints an exciting picture of the present and future of Australian cognitive literary studies, with each chapter taking a different cognitively informed approach against the backdrop of dominant paradigms in the sciences of the mind: embodied and affective cognition. The work covers an impressive range of texts (from literature of the margins to mainstream popular authors) and approaches (including cognitive historicism, affect studies, and reader reception). This eclectic assortment makes no unified argument but rather models different aspects of the field, and the various kinds of knowledge produced by juxtaposing literary and scientific theory.' (Introduction)

'This volume explores the possibilities and potentialities of “negative” affect in postcolonial literature and literary theory, featuring work on postcolonial studies, First Nations studies, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive historicism, reader response theory, postcolonial feminist studies, and trauma studies. The chapters of this work investigate negative affect in all its types and dimensions: analyses of the structures of feeling created by socio-political forces; assemblages and alliances produced by negative emotion; enactive interrelationships of emotion and environment; and the ethical implications of emotional response, to name a few. It seeks to rebrand “negative” emotions as productive forces which can paradoxically confer pleasure, agential power, and social progress through literary representation.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.