"Undiscovered and unmapped country. It's easy to say that humans are "wired" for story, but why? In this book, the author offers a unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life's complex social problems, just as flight simulators prepare pilots for…
"Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, a…
"In the last few decades, literary critics have increasingly drawn insights from cognitive neuroscience to deepen and clarify our understanding of literary representations of mind. This cognitive turn has been equally generative and contentious. While cognitive literary studies …
"While much has been written about the impact of Darwin's theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin's theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. America…
Contributors to this volume examine the question of transmission and of the educational procedures in16th- and 17th-century England by emphasizing deviant practices that questioned, reassessed or even challenged pre-established cultural norms and traditions. Chapters analyse how…
"This volume brings John Milton's Paradise Lost into dialogue with the challenges of cosmology and the world of Galileo, whom Milton met and admired: a universe encompassing space travel, an earth that participates vibrantly in the cosmic dance, and stars that are 'world[s] / Of…
"Taking as his point of departure Norbert Weiners statement that information is basic to understanding materialism in our era, Ronald Schleifer shows how discoveries of modern physics have altered conceptions of matter and energy and the ways in which both information theory and…
