The Oxford handbook of cognitive literary studies /

This ambitious volume's 30 original essays attest to the variety and vitality of literary studies after the "cognitive turn." Grouped by methodology or topic-historicism, narratology, queer theory, disability studies-the essays have a common premise, as articulated by Mary Thomas Crane in the first essay: "The brain [is] a space where the person, culture, and the environment intersect to produce meaning." Cognitive science shows how the universal and the particular, the biological and the cultural, interconnect in synaptic networks. Each essay opens with a literary problematic and then describes experimental research, synthesizes the scientific and the hermeneutic, and applies the results to a fictional work. Standout contributions include Ellen Spolsky on English Renaissance drama; H. Porter Abbott on the Iranian film A Separation; Alan Palmer on the lyrics of country music; and Alan Richardson on how the imagination dismantles and recombines memories as a "survival strategy" to predict outcomes. But the book has flaws: Zunshine's introduction does little to orient the reader; some of the essays probe deeper than others; the book as a whole fails to note that innovations in science do not always lead to insights in criticism. The book documents dozens of scientific advances and cites hundreds of sources but provides no appraisal of their relative significance and no time line. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Philip D. Collington, Niagara University