This book introduces a new thrilling field –neurocomputional poetics, the scientific ‘marriage’ between cognitive poetics, data science and neuroscience. Its goal is to uncover the secrets of verbal art reception and to explain how readers come to understand and like literary texts. The book offers state-of-the-art computational models and methods allowing to predict which crucial textual features of prose and poetry, such as syntactic and semantic complexity or emotion potential, interact with reader features, such as empathy or openness to experience, in shaping a literary reading act with its neuronal, experiential and behavioural correlates. It contains hands-on practical examples on how to do computational text analyses of books and poems that can answer questions like: Which is Jane Austen’s most beautiful book? Which poet created the most fitting poetic metaphors? or Which author of plays of the nineteenth century was the most literary? The model and methods introduced in the book help explain what makes texts comprehensible and likeable and how they affect our body and mind. It offers game-changing insights for both fundamental and applied science that will affect standard metrics of readability and the way text processing and verbal art reception are viewed in literary studies, education, psychology or the media sciences and industry.

At the convergence of human studies, biocultural and neuroscientific research, this book offers unprecedented insights into the interpretation of literary texts. It presents the neurohermeneutics of suspicion—a bold, innovative approach illuminating the intricate bond between literature and the human mind. Embracing ambiguity as a hallmark of literature, readers are encouraged to adopt a suspicious stance to unearth the complex, multilayered and dynamic nature of literary texts, thereby fully engaging their imagination and their embodied, emotional and imaginative faculties. Our exploration navigates the crossroads of language, thought, culture, and biology, delving into hidden layers of meaning within literary texts. This transformative exploration not only redefines literary scholarship but also offers lay readers a dynamic, immersive reading experience. Ultimately, this book aims to ignite curiosity, suspense, and surprise, transforming the act of reading into a creative and engaging journey through the depths of the human mind and aesthetic experiences.

Experts describe current perspectives and experimental approaches to understanding the neural bases of creativity. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the latest neuroscientific approaches to the scientific study of creativity. In chapters that progress logically from neurobiological fundamentals to systems neuroscience and neuroimaging, leading scholars describe the latest theoretical, genetic, structural, clinical, functional, and applied research on the neural bases of creativity. The treatment is both broad and in depth, offering a range of neuroscientific perspectives with detailed coverage by experts in each area. The contributors discuss such issues as the heritability of creativity; creativity in patients with brain damage, neurodegenerative conditions, and mental illness; clinical interventions and the relationship between psychopathology and creativity; neuroimaging studies of intelligence and creativity; the neuroscientific basis of creativity-enhancing methodologies; and the information-processing challenges of viewing visual art. Contributors Baptiste Barbot, Mathias Benedek, David Q. Beversdorf, Aaron P. Blaisdell, Margaret A. Boden, Dorret I. Boomsma, Adam S. Bristol, Shelley Carson, Marleen H. M. de Moor, Andreas Fink, Liane Gabora, Dennis Garlick, Elena L. Grigorenko, Richard J. Haier, Rex E. Jung, James C. Kaufman, Helmut Leder, Kenneth J. Leising, Bruce L. Miller, Apara Ranjan, Mark P. Roeling, W. David Stahlman, Mei Tan, Pablo P. L. Tinio, Oshin Vartanian, Indre V. Viskontas, Dahlia W. Zaidel

For readers daunted by the formal structures and rhetorical sophistication of eighteenth-century English poetry, this introduction by John Sitter brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700–1785 triumphantly to life. Sitter begins by offering a guide to poetic forms ranging from heroic couplets to blank verse, then demonstrates how skilfully male and female poets of the period used them as vehicles for imaginative experience, feelings and ideas. He then provides detailed analyses of individual works by poets from Finch, Swift and Pope, to Gray, Cowper and Barbauld. An approachable introduction to English poetry and major poets of the eighteenth century, this book provides a grounding in poetic analysis useful to students and general readers of literature.

This book introduces a new thrilling field-neurocomputional poetics, the scientific 'marriage' between cognitive poetics, data science and neuroscience. Its goal is to uncover the secrets of verbal art reception and to explain how readers come to understand and like literary texts. For centuries verbal art reception was considered too subjective for quantitative scientific studies and still nowadays many scholars in the humanities and neurosciences alike view literary reading as too complex for accurate computational prediction of the neuronal, experiential and behavioural aspects of reader responses to texts. This book sets out for changing this view. It offers state-of-the-art computational models and methods allowing to predict which crucial textual features of prose and poetry, such as syntactic and semantic complexity or emotion potential, interact with reader features, such as empathy or openness to experience, in shaping a literary reading act. It contains hands-on practical examples on how to do computational text analyses of books and poems that can answer questions like: Which is Jane Austen's most beautiful book? Which poet created the most fitting poetic metaphors? or Which author of plays of the nineteenth century was the most literary? The book's first chapter about 'The Two Boons of an Unnatural Daily Activity' discusses the neuronal bases and other relevant aspects of immersive and aesthetic processes evoked by reading prose and poetry. In the second chapter, the author introduces a comprehensive model of verbal art reception that can explain what makes texts comprehensible and likeable and how they affect our body and mind. The model makes explicit important differences between the reading of prose and poetry and clarifies which text features make prose more immersive and poetry more aesthetic. The next two chapters discuss state-of-the-art methods for quantitative text, reader and reading act analyses from cognitive poetics, data science, psychology and neuroscience and shows how they can be used to dissect the complex author-text-reader nexus that shapes verbal art reception. Chapters 5 and 6 then present hands-on practical examples on how to do simple and sophisticated computational text analyses including sentiment and topic analyses, cutting-edge machine learning methods, and multivariate predictive modeling using neural nets. Chapters 7 and 8 of the book then present a representative sample of empirical studies in both computational and neurocognitive poetics the author and his collaborators have carried out during the last decade. The results of these studies provide comprehensive insights into the complex workings of the brain during verbal art reception from the processing of single words and sentences to the aesthetic evaluation of metaphors or entire poems and novels, including a qualitative-quantitative analysis of the reading of Shakespeare sonnets that will change the ways of scientific studies of literature. The book ends with a short chapter about conclusions and future developments. The model and methods introduced in the book offer game-changing insights for both fundamental and applied science that will affect standard metrics of readability and the way text processing and verbal art reception are viewed in literary studies, education, psychology or the media sciences.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book combines insights from the humanities and modern neuroscience to explore the contribution of affect and embodiment on meaning-making in case studies from animation, video games, and virtual worlds. As we interact more and more with animated characters and avatars in everyday media consumption, it has become vital to investigate the ways that animated environments influence our perception of the liberal humanist subject. This book is the first to apply recent research on the application of the embodied mind thesis to our understanding of embodied engagement with nonhumans and cyborgs in animated media, analyzing works by Émile Cohl, Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, Norman McLaren, the Quay Brothers, Pixar, and many others. Drawing on the breakthroughs of modern brain science to argue that animated media broadens the viewer’s perceptual reach, this title offers a welcome contribution to the growing literature at the intersection of cognitive studies and film studies, with a perspective on animation that is new and original. ‘Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation’ will be essential reading for researchers of Animation Studies, Film and Media Theory, Posthumanism, Video Games, and Digital Culture, and will provide a key insight into animation for both undergraduate and graduate students. Because of the increasing importance of visual effect cinema and video games, the book will also be of keen interest within Film Studies and Media Studies, as well as to general readers interested in scholarship in animated media.