Bøger i Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance serien

Early modern playing companies performed up to six different plays a week and mounted new plays frequently. This book seeks to answer a seemingly simple question: how did they do it? Drawing upon work in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, it proposes that the cognitive work of theatre is distributed across body, brain, and world.

Using Hamlet and a number of other popular and influential seventeenth-century tragedies as case-studies, this book shows how aesthetic experience can help organize the biological functions of our brains into adaptive social networks.

In the first in-depth study of the emotional dimensions of Du Bois's and Emerson's writings on public intellectualism, reform, and race, Schneider offers a valuable and eloquent contribution to the critical tradition.

This book examines how early modern and recently emerging theories of consciousness and cognitive science help us to re-imagine our engagements with Shakespeare in text and performance. Papers investigate the connections between states of mind, emotion, and sensation that constitute consciousness and the conditions of reception in our past and present encounters with Shakespeare¿s works. Acknowledging previous work on inwardness, self, self-consciousness, embodied self, emotions, character, and the mind-body problem, contributors consider consciousness from multiple new perspectives¿as a phenomenological process, a materially determined product, a neurologically mediated reaction, or an internally synthesized identity¿approaching Shakespeare¿s plays and associated cultural practices in surprising and innovative ways.