In Body of Vision, Michael Sinding connects Northrop Frye's groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the human imagination with cognitive poetics - the cutting-edge school of literary criticism that applies the principles of cognitive science to the interpretation of literary texts and contexts. Sinding undertakes this task through analyses of the interplay of metaphoric and narrative schemas in several forms of cultural mythology. Sinding identifies the profound connections between cognitive views of language, literature, and culture and Frye's views by exploring three related aspects of Frye's work - meaning and thought, culture and society, and literary history. He investigates these connections through detailed studies of major cultural texts including Dante's Divine Comedy, Hobbes' Leviathan, Rousseau's Social Contract, and Milton's "Lycidas." By linking Frye's classic studies to exciting recent approaches in the humanities and the cognitive revolution of the past few decades, Body of Vision casts Frye's achievements in a fascinating new light.

This volume explores cognitive perspectives on how science and narrative shape one another. Narrative is a principle of cognition, and cognition is fundamental to narrative. This duality enables a deeper mapping of the feedback between story and the natural sciences. Science, as a culturally-organized and systematic mode of knowing the world, may seem opposed to narrative thinking. Yet they are deeply interwoven. Scientists tell many kinds of stories, across genres and media. In thought experiments, lab experiments, written arguments, and histories and philosophies of fields, they recount and interpret unfoldings of events at often uncanny scales—from particle collisions to the evolution of life to cosmic expansion. Science stories go beyond science. Early science is entwined with myth, religion and magic. We still mythologize beneficent or evil geniuses, the promises and perils of technology. Teachers, journalists, politicians and lawyers all tell science stories for their own purposes. Literary artists use scientific ideas and forms, reimagining physical forces, causality and time in storyworlds, themes and figures. This is the first cognition-focused multi-disciplinary analysis of these narrative-science relations.