This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process linguistic or visual information, and what properties in artworks trigger aesthetic experiences. The examination of the properties of aesthetic experience reveals essential aspects of our perceptual, cognitive, and semiotic capacities. The second issue studied in this volume is related to the ontology of the work of art: Written or visual artworks are a specific type of objects, containing particular kinds of representation which elicit a particular kind of experience. The research question explored is: What properties in artful objects trigger this type of experience, and what characterizes representation in written and visual artworks? The volume sets the scene for state-of-the-art inquiries in the intersection between the psychology and ontology of art. The investigations of the relation between the properties of artworks and the characteristics of aesthetic experience increase our insight into what art is. In addition, they shed light on essential properties of human meaning-making in general.

Semiotics (the study of sign processes-'semiosis'-and sign systems) embraces linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies, as well as linking to anthropology, art, psychology, and biology. This new Routledge collection helps to make sense of the subject's huge interdisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature and brings together the best and most influential materials from 'the first phase', neo-classics from the institutionalization of semiotics in the 1960s, and contemporary works illustrating the ongoing development of semiotics and its widening applications (for example, in the natural sciences). Volume I ('Philosophy') collects pre-modern material showing the genesis of semiotics from Locke to Peirce, along with a range of work from the last thirty years. Volume II ('Linguistics') includes key work from recent developments in cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics, while Volume III focuses on 'Text and Image'. Finally, Volume IV ('Logic, Biology, Psychology, Culture, and Anthropology') gathers the best offerings from other disciplines, and from emerging fields such as 'biosemiotics'. Fully indexed, and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, this is an essential work destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital one-stop reference resource.

Narrative Theories and Poetics: 5 Questions is a collection of short interviews based on five provoking questions presented to some of the most influential and prominent scholars in these fields. They present us with their views on narrative theories and poetics, its aim, scope, use, the future direction of the fields and how their work fits in these respects.