4e Cognition And Eighteenth-century Fiction: How The Novel Found Its Feet (cognition And Poetics)

When the novel broke into cultural prominence in the eighteenth century, it became notorious for the gripping, immersive style of its narratives. In this book, Karin Kukkonen explores this phenomenon through the embodied style in Eliza Haywood's flamboyant amatory fiction, Charlotte Lennox's work as a cultural broker between Britain and France, Sarah Fielding's experimental novels, and Frances Burney's practice of life-writing and fiction-writing. Four female authors who are often written out of the history of the genre are here foregrounded in a critical account that emphasizes the importance of engaging readers' minds and bodies, and which invites us to revisit our understanding of the rise of the modern novel. Kukkonen's innovative theoretical approach is based on the approach of 4E cognition, which views thinking as profoundly embodied and embedded in social and material contexts, extending into technologies and material devices (such as a pen), and enactive in the inherent links between perceiving the world and moving around in it. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction investigates the eighteenth-century novel through each of these trajectories and shows how language explores its embodied dimension by increasing the descriptions of inner perception, or the bodily gestures around spoken dialogue. The embodied dimension is then related to the media ecologies of letter-writing, book learning, and theatricality. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels 'real' because it is integrated into the lifeworld and embodied experiences. 4E cognition answers one of the central challenges to cognitive literary studies: how to integrate historical and cultural contexts into cognitive approaches. When the novel broke into cultural prominence in the eighteenth century, it became notorious for the gripping, immersive style of its narratives. In this book, Karin Kukkonen explores this phenomenon through the embodied style in Eliza Haywood's flamboyant amatory fiction, Charlotte Lennox's work as a cultural broker between Britain and France, Sarah Fielding's experimental novels, and Frances Burney's practice of life-writing and fiction-writing. Four female authors who are often written out of the history of the genre are here foregrounded in a critical account that emphasizes the importance of engaging readers' minds and bodies, and which invites us to revisit our understanding of the rise of the modern novel.Kukkonen's innovative theoretical approach is based on the approach of 4E cognition, which views thinking as profoundly embodied and embedded in social and material contexts, extending into technologies and material devices (such as a pen), and enactive in the inherent links between perceiving the world and moving around in it. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction investigates the eighteenth-century novel through each of these trajectories and shows how language explores its embodied dimension by increasing the descriptions of inner perception, or the bodily gestures around spoken dialogue. The embodied dimension is then related to the media ecologies of letter-writing, book learning, and theatricality. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels 'real' because it is integrated into the lifeworld and embodied experiences.4E cognition answers one of the central challenges to cognitive literary studies: how to integrate historical and cultural contexts into cognitive approaches. " When the novel broke into cultural prominence in the eighteenth century, it became notorious for the gripping, immersive style of its narratives. In this book, Karin Kukkonen explores this phenomenon through the embodied style in Eliza Haywood's flamboyant amatory fiction, Charlotte Lennox's work as a cultural broker between Britain and France, Sarah Fielding's experimental novels, and Frances Burney'' practice of life--writing and fiction-writing. Four female authors who are often written out of the history of the genre are here foregrounded in a critical account that emphasizes the importance of engaging readers' minds and bodies, and which invites us to revisit our understanding of the rise of the modern novel. Kukkonen's innovative theoretical approach is based on the approach of 4E cognition, which views thinking as profoundly embodied and embedded in social and material contexts, extending into technologies and material devices (such as a pen), and enactive in the inherent links between perceiving the world and moving around in it. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction investigates the eighteenth-century novel through each of these trajectories and shows how language explores its embodied dimension by increasing the descriptions of inner perception, or the bodily gestures around spoken dialogue. The embodied dimension is then related to the media ecologies of letter-writing, book learning, and theatricality. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels 'real' because it is integrated into the lifeworld and embodied experiences. 4E cognition answers one of the central challenges to cognitive literary studies: how to integrate historical and cultural contexts into cognitive approaches. "-- Provided by publisher Cover Series 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction Copyright Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: How the Novel Found Its Feet 1. The Curse of Realism 2. Haywood: Shaping a Fictional Language of Embodiment 2.1. Precision Management 2.2. Haywood’s Poetics: Embodiment and Mediation 2.3. Embedded Immersion 2.4. Speaking Roles 3. Lennox: Repertoires of Embodiment 3.1. Falling in Love in the Eighteenth Century 3.2. The Uses of the Novel 3.3. Enacted Maxims 3.4. “A New Surprise Is Perpetually Creating” 4. Fielding: A Lifeworld of Books 4.1. Reading at Mid-​Century 4.2. Ancients and Moderns 4.3. Players and Hypocrites 4.4. A New Mode of Mockery 5. Burney: Writing Life and Fiction 5.1. Enacting Your Own Characters 5.2. Erlebte Rede /​ Experienced Speech 5.3. Pens, Pins, and Paper 5.4. Meta-​Life-​Writing 6. The Novel as a Lifeworld Technology Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index "When the novel broke into cultural prominence in the eighteenth century, it was notorious for the gripping, immersive style of its narratives and this remains a signal feature of the genre until our days. My book shows how this embodied style developed in eighteenth-century writing through Eliza Haywood's flamboyant amatory fiction, Charlotte Lennox's work as a cultural broker between Britain and France, Sarah Fielding's experimental novels and Frances Burney's crossings between life-writing and fiction-writing. Four female authors that are often written out of the history of the genre are brought forward in a critical account that underlines the importance of engaging readers' mind and bodies and that invites us to revisit standard narratives of the rise of the novel"-- Provided by publisher Through study of female writers of the 18th-century novel, Kukkonen explores how literary texts draw on embodied experience and the lived reality of literature and reading. She approaches embodied style through the approach of 4E cognition, which understands the mind as embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive in the environment. The work breaks new ground in showing the promise of 4E cognition for cognitive poetics, and how the fiction-writing develops diverse repertoires of embodied language for the history of the novel Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: How the Novel Found its Feet -- Chapter 1: The Curse of Realism -- Chapter 2: Haywood: Shaping a Fictional Language of Embodiment -- Chapter 3: Lennox: Repertoires of Embodiment -- Chapter 4: Fielding: A Lifeworld of Books -- Chapter 5: Burney: Writing Life and Fiction -- Chapter 6: The Novel as a Lifeworld Technology -- Conclusion -- Endnotes