Unorthodox Minds in Contemporary Fiction seeks to provide an overview of the ways in which broadly understood contemporary fiction envisions, explores and engenders minds going beyond the classical models. The opening essay discusses the complex relationships between such innovative concepts of the mind and experimental techniques for presenting mentality. The chapters which follow focus on (dis)embodied and/or extended mind, virtuality of avatar minds, intermental thought of reader communities, the capability of artificial intelligence (and humans) for genuine selfless love, the interplay between technology and affect in posthuman consciousness. The books under discussion include Murmur by Will Eaves, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker and Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan. A piece of conceptual fiction by Steve Tomasula, one of the most innovative American novelists of our times, exploring the human mind’s alleged power to transcend its biological limits, complements these scholarly inquiries.

This volume argues that contemporary narratives evince a great deal of resilience by promoting an ecology of attention based on poetic options that develop an ethics of the particularist type. The contributors draw on critical and theoretical literature hailing from various fields: including psychology and sociology, but more prominently phenomenology, political philosophy, analytical philosophy (essentially Ordinary Language Philosophy), alongside the Ethics of Care and Vulnerability. This volume is designed as an innovative contribution to the nascent field of the study of attention in literary criticism, an area that is full of potential. Its scope is wide, as it embraces a great deal of the Anglophone world, with Britain, Ireland, the USA, but also Australia and even Malta. Its chapters focus on well-established authors, like Kazuo Ishiguro (whose work is revisited here in a completely new light) or more confidential ones like Melissa Harrison or Sarah Moss.

Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics addresses the philosophical issues that lie at the heart of Ishiguro’s fiction, shedding light on the moral condition of his characters – their sense of responsibility and pride in service, their attempts at self-determination and the value they assign to loyalty, love and friendship. Ethics in Ishiguro’s work is structured around the tension between the limits of the characters’ agency and their striving towards the good. Ishiguro’s novels are shown to tackle fundamental questions posed by ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato, and modern Western ones, from Adam Smith through Jean-Paul Sartre to Martha Nussbaum. What is the human soul? What is dignity? What does it mean to be human? These issues are expressed in his narrative world through the universal and timeless language of myths, allegories and images that are both ancient and modern as well as cross-cultural.

Orthodox psychiatric texts are often rich in facts, but thin in concept. Depression may be defined as a dysfunction of mood, but of what use is a mood? How can anxiety be both symptom and adaptation to stress? What links the disparate disabilities of perception and reasoning in schizophrenia? Why does the same situation push one person into drink, drugs, danger, or despair and bounce harmlessly off another? Trouble in Mind is unorthodox because it models adaptive mental function along with mental illness to answer questions like these. From experience as a Johns Hopkins clinician, educator, and researcher, Dean F. MacKinnon offers a unique perspective on the nature of human anguish, unreason, disability, and self-destruction. He shows what mental illness can teach about the mind, from molecules to memory to motivation to meaning. MacKinnon’s fascinating model of the mind as a vital function will enlighten anyone intrigued by the mysteries of thought, feeling, and behavior. Clinicians in training will especially appreciate the way mental illness can illuminate normal mental processes, as medical illness in general teaches about normal body functions. For students, the book also includes useful guides to psychiatric assessment and diagnosis.

Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction is a collection of essays examining the potential of the contemporary English-language novel to represent and inquire into various aspects of the human mind. Grounded in contemporary literary theory as well as consciousness studies, the essays consider both narrative techniques by means of which writers attempt to render various states of consciousness (such as multimodality in digital fiction or experimental typography in post-traumatic narratives), and novelistic interpretations of issues currently being investigated by neurobiologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of the mind (such as the adaptive value of consciousness or the process of self-integration by means of self-narration). The volume thus offers critical reflection upon the novel’s cognitive accomplishment in this challenging area. Contributors are: Nathan D. Frank, Judit Friedrich, Justyna Galant, Marta Komsta, Péter Kristóf Makai, Ajitpaul Mangat, Grzegorz Maziarczyk, James McAdams, Daniel Panka, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Joanna Klara Teske, Lloyd Issac Vayo, Dóra Vecsernyés, Sylwia Wilczewska

In v.1-8 the final number consists of the Commencement annual.

Crime narratives form a large and central part of the modern cultural landscape. This book explores the cognitive stylistic processing of prose and audiovisual fictional crime 'texts'. It also examines instances where such narratives find themselves, through popular demand, 'migrating' - meaning that they cross languages, media formats and/or cultures. In doing so, Crime Fiction Migration proposes a move from a monomodal to a multimodal approach to the study of crime fiction. Examining original crime fiction works alongside their translations, adaptations and remakings proves instrumental in understanding how various semiotic modes interact with one another. The book analyses works such as We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Killing trilogy and the reimaginings of plays such as Shear Madness and films such as Funny Games. Crime fiction is consistently popular and 'on the move' - witness the spate of detective series exported out of Scandinavia, or the ever popular exporting of these shows from the USA. This multimodal and semiotically-aware analysis of global crime narratives expands the discipline and is key reading for students of linguistics, criminology, literature and film.

‘Contemporary Literature’ is among the most popular areas of literary study but it can be a difficult one to define. This book equips readers with the necessary tools to take an analytical and systematic approach to contemporary texts. The author provides answers to some of the critical questions in the field: What makes a literary text contemporary? Is it possible to have a canon of contemporary literature? How does a reader’s location affect their understanding? How do print, electronic, and audio-visual media impact upon contemporary literature? Which key concepts and themes are most prevalent? Containing diverse illustrative examples and discussing the topics which define our current sense of the contemporary, this is an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to engage critically with contemporary literature.

A pioneering text in its first edition, this revised publication of Cognitive Poetics offers a rigorous and principled approach to literary reading and analysis. The second edition of this seminal text features: • updated theory, frameworks, and examples throughout, including new explanations of literary meaning, the power of reading, literary force, and emotion; • extended examples of literary texts from Old English to contemporary literature, covering genres including religious, realist, romantic, science fictional, and surrealist texts, and encompassing poetry, prose, and drama; • new chapters on the mind-modelling of character, the building of text-worlds, the feeling of immersion and ambience, and the resonant power of emotion in literature; • fully updated and accessible accounts of Cognitive Grammar, deictic shifts, prototypicality, conceptual framing, and metaphor in literary reading. Encouraging the reader to adopt a fresh approach to understanding literature and literary analyses, each chapter introduces a different framework within cognitive poetics and relates it to a literary text. Accessibly written and reader-focused, the book invites further explorations either individually or within a classroom setting. This thoroughly revised edition of Cognitive Poetics includes an expanded further reading section and updated explorations and discussion points, making it essential reading for students on literary theory and stylistics courses, as well as a fundamental tool for those studying critical theory, linguistics, and literary studies.