REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 24 (2008)

There is growing concern in the humanities that advances in the neurosciences constitute a threat to its traditional expertise in matters of the mind. For many literary scholars the neurosciences and literary studies operate at the opposite ends of the research spectrum and have radically incompatible pictures of how the mind works. Mark Turner and others have recently shown, however, that there is a lot to be learnt from each other, that the complexities of literature and the arts can tell us a great deal about how the brain processes information and conceptualizes the world and vice versa, that an advanced understanding of the complexities of brain processes can help us understand what literature and the arts do in and to the brain to make it mind.

This volume collects contributions to a conference held at the Centre for British Studies in April this year. Contributors are, among others, Mark Turner, Patrick Hogan, Lisa Zunshine, Alan Palmer, Ronals Shusterman, Hebert Grabes and Valentine Cunningham.