ABSTRACT
The study of literature has become much less elitist over the past couple of decades. The most obvious manifestation of this development is the rise of cultural studies, which approaches literature as just one element of all culture, including music, film, television, the printed press, and so on. A somewhat more recent manifestation is cognitive poetics, presented to a broad public by Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (Stockwell 2002a). Cognitive poetics, too, sees literature not just as a matter for the happy few, but as a specific form of everyday human experience and especially cognition that is grounded in our general cognitive capacities for making sense of the world.
