This study provides an introduction to the neoclassical debates around how literature is shaped in concert with the thinking and feeling human mind. Three key rules of neoclassicism, namely, poetic justice (the rewards and punishments of characters in the plot), the unities (the coherence of the fictional world and its extensions through the imagination) and decorum (the inferential connections between characters and their likely actions), are reconsidered in light of social cognition, embodied cognition and probabilistic, predictive cognition. The meeting between neoclassical criticism and today's research psychology, neurology and philosophy of mind yields a new perspective for cognitive literary study.Neoclassicism has a crucial contribution to make to current debates around the role of literature in cultural and cognition. Literary critics writing at the time of the scientific revolution developed a perspective on literature the question of how literature engages minds and bodies as its central concern. A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics traces the cognitive dimension of these critical debates in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and puts them into conversation with today's cognitive approaches to literature.Neoclassical theory is then connected to the praxis of eighteenth-century writers in a series of case studies that trace how these principles shaped the emerging narrative form of the novel. The continuing relevance of neoclassicism also shows itself in the rise of the novel, as A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics illustrates through examples including Pamela, Tom Jones and the Gothic novel.

AcknowledgementsPrefaceChapter 1: Neoclassical Poetics and the Rise of the Novel1.1 Beating the Bounds of the Rules in Incognita1.2 Manners, Passions, Unities1.3 Neoclassicism and the SciencesChapter 2. The Situational Logic of Vraisemblance2.1. Cognitive Moves2.2. Successful Solutions2.3. Vraisemblance NowI: Poetic JusticeChapter 3: Samuel Richardson and the Project of Poetic Justice3.1. Virtue Rewarded3.2. Altruistic Punishers in B-Hall3.3 Pamela - Shamela - Anti-PamelaChapter 4: The Trials of Clarissa4.1 Editing the Social Contract4.2 Lovelace's Happy Endings4.3. Poetic Justice at the LimitsChapter 5: Ann Radcliffe and the Abdication of the Superpunisher5.1 Comeuppance Clockworks5.2 Enter the Uncanny5.3 The Supernatural and SuperpunishersII: The UnitiesChapter 6: The Best Possible Storyworld: Johnson's Rasselas6.1 Rasselas, the Imagination and the Unities6.2 Event Cognition, Spatialization and the Conceptual Shape of the Storyworld6.3 Closure in AbissiniaChapter 7: Utopian Reasoning in Mercier's L'An 2440 and Madden's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century7.1 Poetics and Politics7.2 The Cognitive Estrangements of Utopia7.3 The Idea of Progress and Intertemporal Bargaining in Utopian Fiction7.4 A Unified UtopiaChapter 8: The Dramatic Passages of The Castle of Otranto8.1. Where the Bodies Are8.2 The Return of Racine8.3 Embodied Experience in the NovelIII: DecorumChapter 9. Henry Fielding's Probability Design9.1 9.2 Decorum and Surprise9.3 A HeroChapter 10. The Female Quixote and the Probability of Romance10.1. The Querelle de Miss Groves10.2 Educating Readers10.3 Arabella's WagerChapter 11. John Cleland vs. the Novel11.1. Building a Social World in Mrs Mercier's Academy11.2. The Predictable Novel11.3. Love, Duty and the End of CuriosityConclusion: Explorations in the Prehistory of Cognitive PoeticsBibliography