Product Description: Evolutionary theory sparked numerous speculations about human development, and one of the most ardently embraced was the idea that children are animals recapitulating the ascent of the species. After Darwin's Origin of Species, scientific, pedagogical, and literary works featuring beastly babes and wild children interrogated how our ancestors evolved and what children must do in order to repeat this course to humanity...read more

Product Description: Over the last two decades, the notion of make-believe has become a major theory for the understanding of representational arts in general. As a contribution to this development, the current volume provides 17 articles on how make-believe theory can be used to explain the generation of fictional truths in various forms of representations such as novels, poems, plays, computer games, role playing games, music, and virtual reality...read more

Product Description: With a thorough examination of ancient views of literary and artistic realism, allegory and symbolism, The Poetics of Phantasia brings together a study of the ways in which the concept of imagination (phantasia in Greek) was used in ancient aesthetics and literary theory...read more

Product Description: Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J...read more

Product Description: Examining a range of Coleridge's writings, this book uses recent scientific research to understand how we have evolved to make mental representations of the counterfactual, how such transformative essays in Imagination have enabled humans to survive, to prosper and to express themselves in the sciences, the arts and particularly in poetry...read more

Product Description: In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period’s meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking her cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one...read more

Product Description: In Imagining Toronto, Amy Lavender Harris ventures deep into the imagined city Ñ the Toronto of fiction, poetry, and essays Ñ where she dowses for meaning in the literature of the city on the lake as its inhabitants understand, remember, and dream it...read more

Product Description: The central component of this volume are Dilthey's "Essays on literary history," which were planned for publication in 1895, but have yet to be published in original sequence and form. In the antiquated-seeming title the search for an adequately productive body of work of the poet and his particular role in society are reflected upon...read more