• Preface


• 1: Openings


• 2: Cognitive conversations


• 3: The balloon, the shed, and the bees


• 4: Literary affordances: culture as second nature


• 5: The balloon of the mind: literary imaginations


• 6: Cognitive figures


• 7: Cognitive mimesis: the cliff and the ballroom


• 8: The posture of reading: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim


• 9: Literary values in a cognitive perspective


• A virtual manifesto for cognitive literary studies

Terence Cave CBE FBA is a specialist in early modern French literature, thought, and culture. His major publications in this area include The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (1979), Pré-histoires: textes troublés au seuil de la modernité (1999), Pré-histoires II: langues étrangères et troubles économiques au XVIe siècle (2001), and How to Read Montaigne (2007). His wider interest in European literature and the history of poetics is represented by Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988), Mignon's Afterlives: Crossing Cultures from Goethe to the Twenty-First Century (2011), and (with Sarah Kay and Malcolm Bowie) A Short History of French Literature (2003). In 2009 he was awarded the Balzan Foundation Prize for 'Literature since 1500', and he is currently director of the Balzan Interdisciplinary Seminar 'Literature as an Object of Knowledge', based at the St John's College Research Centre.

Thinking with Literature offers a succinct introduction to a cognitive literary criticsm. Broad in scope but focusing on a particular cluster of approaches, it aims to induce a change of perspective in the reader.