Introduction

I begin by discussing the turn away from postmodernism in both literary theory and contemporary fiction, setting Wallace’s own work against developments in the humanities towards a more scientific literary study. I survey the rise of specific movements such as cognitive literary studies, literary Darwinism, and the study of the “neuronovel,” and discuss their strengths and limitations. Taking Alan Richardson’s cognitive historicism as a model for my own work, I argue that we need to understand Wallace in the context of both the neurocognitive debates of his day and a much older humanist tradition. The contemporary, posthuman model of the embodied brain is central to Wallace’s work, but so is his critique of that model: the soul and the interior self are as vital a part of Wallace’s fiction as the bodies in which those souls are housed.