What is cognitive cultural studies?

This volume brings together fourteen essays representing the rapidly growing interdisciplinary fi eld of cognitive approaches to literature and culture. Refl ecting the explosion of academic and public interest in cognitive science in the last two decades, it features work that combines literary and cultural analysis with insights from neuroscience, discursive psychology, cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of mind. That readers, both specialist and nonspecialist, are eager for an informed and sustained conversation about literature, culture, and cognition is apparent from the stream of conferences, essays, monographs, and World Wide Web discussions on the subject. To mention just one example that demonstrates the interest it elicits, the membership in the MLA offi cial discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature has grown from 250 in 1999, the year it was organized, to over 1,221 in 2009.