• Links the cultural agency of imaginative discourse to its capacity to address, challenge, and evoke a deep sociality characteristic of humans; • Brings together two prominent currents informing contemporary literary theory—affective and neurocognitive-evolutionary literary studies and work calling for renewed attentiveness to ethical and aesthetic qualities in literary works; • Develops and illustrates his arguments through analyses of a wide range of literary works

• Links the cultural agency of imaginative discourse to its capacity to address, challenge, and evoke a deep sociality characteristic of humans; • Brings together two prominent currents informing contemporary literary theory—affective and neurocognitive-evolutionary literary studies and work calling for renewed attentiveness to ethical and aesthetic qualities in literary works; • Develops and illustrates his arguments through analyses of a wide range of literary works

Bringing together neuroscientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars in cross-disciplinary exploration of the topic of cultural memory, this collection moves from seminal discussions of the latest findings in neuroscience to variegated, specific case studies of social practices and artistic expressions. This volume highlights what can be gained from drawing on broad interdisciplinary contexts in pursuing scholarly projects involving cultural memory and associated topics. The collection argues that contemporary evolutionary science, in conjunction with studies interconnecting cognition, affect, and emotion, as well as research on socially mediated memory, provides innovatively interdisciplinary contexts for viewing current work on how cultural and social environments influence gene expression and neural circuitry. Building on this foundation, Cultural Memory turns to the exploration of the psychological processes and social contexts through which cultural memory is shaped, circulated, revised, and contested. It investigates how various modes of cultural expression-architecture, cuisine, poetry, film, and fiction-reconfigure shared conceptualizing patterns and affectively mediated articulations of identity and value. Each chapter showcases research from a wide range of fields and presents diverse interdisciplinary contexts for future scholarship. As cultural memory is a subject that invites interdisciplinary perspectives and is relevant to studying cultures around the world, of every era, this collection addresses an international readership comprising scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, from advanced undergraduates to senior researchers.

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

Bringing together neuroscientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars in cross-disciplinary exploration of the topic of cultural memory, this collection moves from seminal discussions of the latest findings in neuroscience to variegated, specific case studies of social practices and artistic expressions. This volume highlights what can be gained from drawing on broad interdisciplinary contexts in pursuing scholarly projects involving cultural memory and associated topics. The collection argues that contemporary evolutionary science, in conjunction with studies interconnecting cognition, affect, and emotion, as well as research on socially mediated memory, provides innovatively interdisciplinary contexts for viewing current work on how cultural and social environments influence gene expression and neural circuitry. Building on this foundation, Cultural Memory turns to the exploration of the psychological processes and social contexts through which cultural memory is shaped, circulated, revised, and contested. It investigates how various modes of cultural expression-architecture, cuisine, poetry, film, and fiction-reconfigure shared conceptualizing patterns and affectively mediated articulations of identity and value. Each chapter showcases research from a wide range of fields and presents diverse interdisciplinary contexts for future scholarship. As cultural memory is a subject that invites interdisciplinary perspectives and is relevant to studying cultures around the world, of every era, this collection addresses an international readership comprising scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, from advanced undergraduates to senior researchers.

In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoume's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives.

This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts-in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.

In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoume's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives.

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

In thirteen essays on writers ranging from Virginia Woolf and A. A. Milne to J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy, Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature puts the thought of the twentieth century's most innovative ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, in dialogue with established twentieth-century masterpieces, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, As I Lay Dying, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Gravity's Rainbow, as well as with such innovative recent works as Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Gabrielle Ghermandi's Regina di fiori e di perle, depicting Italian colonization of Ethiopia and African immigration to Italy. Essays in the collection consider new media (radio) and explore such issues as the ethics of representation in British and American modernism, memory and subject formation in children's literature, voice in radio, embodiment and performance in drama, trauma and affectivity in postcolonial and postmodern contexts, narrative depiction of temporal disorientation in contemporary fiction, and the challenges of fashioning ethical literary responses to the horrific and unspeakable. An introduction situates Levinas's thought in relation to both the history of Western philosophy and current critical theory, and an overview of Levinas's career considers his work as a response to the twentieth-century European experience from pre-World War One progressivism to 1980s anti-immigrant agitation. Each essay highlights both how Levinas's work may contribute to literary criticism and how literary criticism may interrogate and refine philosophical discourse. By delineating connections linking literature, philosophy, critical theory, and cultural-historical analysis, the collection situates Levinas within the contexts of his own century even as it offers accounts of the unity and diversity of literature the century produced. In articulating relationships between Levinasian themes and preoccupations and those shaping modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, gender studies, globalism, and in exploring the kinship between Levinas's work and other forms of anti-totalizing twentieth-century thought, the collection probes how modernist technique and anti-totalizing ethics enter into relations that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, not only revitalize diverse national literatures but also produce post-national, migrant, or hybrid literatures marked by explorations of the entwinement of trauma and ethical subjectivity whose theorization Levinas pioneers.

In thirteen essays on writers ranging from Virginia Woolf and A. A. Milne to J. M. Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy, Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature puts the thought of the twentieth century's most innovative ethical philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, in dialogue with established twentieth-century masterpieces, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, As I Lay Dying, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Gravity's Rainbow, as well as with such innovative recent works as Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Gabrielle Ghermandi's Regina di fiori e di perle, depicting Italian colonization of Ethiopia and African immigration to Italy. Essays in the collection consider new media (radio) and explore such issues as the ethics of representation in British and American modernism, memory and subject formation in children's literature, voice in radio, embodiment and performance in drama, trauma and affectivity in postcolonial and postmodern contexts, narrative depiction of temporal disorientation in contemporary fiction, and the challenges of fashioning ethical literary responses to the horrific and unspeakable. An introduction situates Levinas's thought in relation to both the history of Western philosophy and current critical theory, and an overview of Levinas's career considers his work as a response to the twentieth-century European experience from pre-World War One progressivism to 1980s anti-immigrant agitation. Each essay highlights both how Levinas's work may contribute to literary criticism and how literary criticism may interrogate and refine philosophical discourse. By delineating connections linking literature, philosophy, critical theory, and cultural-historical analysis, the collection situates Levinas within the contexts of his own century even as it offers accounts of the unity and diversity of literature the century produced. In articulating relationships between Levinasian themes and preoccupations and those shaping modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism, gender studies, globalism, and in exploring the kinship between Levinas's work and other forms of anti-totalizing twentieth-century thought, the collection probes how modernist technique and anti-totalizing ethics enter into relations that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, not only revitalize diverse national literatures but also produce post-national, migrant, or hybrid literatures marked by explorations of the entwinement of trauma and ethical subjectivity whose theorization Levinas pioneers.

This book analyzes how Francophone narratives written from the 1950s to the 1990s explore the struggle to craft decolonized forms of Islamic identity within sub-Saharan and North African societies. Considering major narratives by Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mariama Ba, Assia Djebar, Rachid Boudjedra, Yambo Ouologuem, and Amadou Kourouma, Donald Wehrs highlights not only the writers' often sharply divergent attitudes toward Islam and varying assessments of possible relations between Islamic selfhood neither uncritical of Western modernity nor unreflectively hostile toward it. In articulating their conceptions of Islamic identity and ethical subjectivity, all of these writers set up a dialogue with the ethical implications of novelistic discourse. The inescapable ethics of affective appeals generated by lived experience are intrinsic to these works, as they are to all novels. When such appeals are put into dialogue with the teachings of Islam, they tend, on the one hand, to privilege its iconoclasm, to make common cause with the self-critical tenor of Islam, its suspicion of the "idol-making" propensity of elites, socio-political orders, and human beings generally. On the other hand, Islam requires novelistic discourse to distinguish ethics from enjoyment, ethical selfhood from unchecked and thus self-deifying and irresponsible autonomy. The privileging of prophetic discourse in Islamic novels illuminates the ethics of novelistic discourse while at the same time forcing it to question such Western idols as freedom as its own justification and material comfort as the central good of social, political life. By pursuing each narrative's engagement with Islam as a form of piety rooted in ethical revolt against egoism and idolatry, the study challenges Western academic postcolonial criticism to hear the evocation of Islamic ethical discourse within fictions addressing the trauma of decolonization in Muslim socio-political contexts."