The Emergence of Mind

Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English

David Herman

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780803211179
• eBook ISBN: 9780803234987
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Chaucer's Pardoner to Eliot's Edward Casaubon, from Behn's Oroonoko to Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway—the multifarious perceptions, inferences, memories, attitudes, and emotions of such characters are in some cases as vividly familiar to us readers as those of the living, breathing individuals we know from our own day-to-day experiences in the world at large. Equally diverse are the investigative frameworks that have been developed to study such fictional minds, their operations and qualities, and the narrative means used to portray them. The Emergence of Mind provides new perspectives on the strategies used to represent minds in stories andsuggests the variety of analytic approaches that illuminate those strategies. In this interdisciplinary and groundbreaking collection of essays, distinguished scholars such as Monika Fludernik, Alan Palmer, and Lisa Zunshine examine trends in the representation of consciousness in English-language narrative discourse from 700 to the present. Tracing commonalities and differences in the portrayal of fictional minds over virtually the entire time span during which narrative discourse in English has been written and read, The Emergence of Mind will have a lasting impact on literary studies, narratology, and other fields.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Representing Minds in Old and Middle English Narrative
• Part II: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Minds
• Part III: Contexts for Consciousness in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Part IV: Remodeling the Mind in Modernist and Postmodernist Narrative
• Contributors
• Index