ABSTRACT
A recent ‘cognitive turn’ in literary studies has been noted by many scholars, and cognitive poetics is part of this movement. Cognitive poetics is a discipline in its infancy, as Stockwell attests when he refers to it as “one of the first disciplines to have emerged within the internet age” (2005: 267). It draws on a range of findings from disciplines within the cognitive sciences: cognitive psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience, and cognitive linguistics. Cognitive poetics is also strongly affiliated with stylistics. Stylistics, as a literary linguistic subject, concentrates upon the formal features of language and how these features are used within literary texts. Building upon this, cognitive poetics seeks to look at form, style, and language in literature in context but through the conviction that structures of language and literary devices are expressions and materialisations of patterns of human thought. Thus, as Gavins and Steen put it, literature is “a specific form of human experience” (2003b: 1) and as such its study may reveal to us the cognitive practices by which we not only read literature but perceive and understand the world.
