Provides a reflection on the relations between nature and culture as manifested by literary artefacts, and reframes literary study as a form of cognitive anthropology and archaeology.

Terence Cave CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Known primarily for his contributions to French Renaissance studies, he has also written on Aristotelian poetics and on the relations between literature and music. In 2009, he won the Balzan Prize for literature since 1500; he subsequently directed the Balzan project 'Literature as an object of knowledge', which explored cognitive approaches to literature. His books Thinking with Literature and Reading Beyond the Code (jointly edited with Deirdre Wilson) were outcomes of this project.

• Introduction


• 1: Literary Artefacts: Orpheus' Head


• 2: Artefacts, Affordances, Constructions


• 3: Questions of Language: Strange Collocations


• 4: Questions of Language: Cognitive Ekphrasis


• 5: Questions of Time: Echoes, Iterations


• 6: Questions of Time: Simultaneity, Attunement


• 7: Capturing Cognitive Dissonance


• 8: Proust's Protozoa


• 9: Live Artefacts


• Afterthoughts


• Glossary


• Bibliography