The Contracts of Fiction
Cognition, Culture, Community
Ellen Spolsky
Reviews and Awards
"Why do all people everywhere of all ages in all societies over all history and throughout the entire world invest nearly inconceivable resources in imaginative fiction-dreams, daydreams, simulations, counterfactual scenarios, possibilities, reveries, poems, plays, films, cartoons, tragedies, comedies, dramas? The scientific question is open, grand, and fundamental. Ellen Spolsky's cognitive defense of fiction is a major contribution." - Mark Turner, Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University
"Instability, failure, and representational hunger afford individuals and societies 'the freedom to reimagine and change direction,' while art and literature are the protected spaces for such reimagining. To explain how this works, Spolsky brings together cutting-edge research in evolutionary biology, social and legal history, and literary criticism. Brilliant, witty, reader-friendly, The Contracts of Fiction is the gold standard of cognitive literary studies. This is the scholarship of the future." - Lisa Zunshine, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies
"Extending the author's pioneering efforts to foster dialogue between literary studies and the cognitive sciences, Ellen Spolsky's The Contracts of Fiction shows how a range of artifacts" - poetry as well as drama, narratives as well as static images
"The Contracts of Fiction asks why we invest so much energy producing, consuming, and sharing fictions despite their evident lack of truth value. Deftly recruiting concepts from the biological and cognitive sciences to the aid of literary theory, Ellen Spolsky produces the most compelling synthesis to date of cognitive, evolutionary, and literary understandings of the human imagination." - Alan Richardson, author of The Neural Sublime