Description
Book SynopsisThe imagination is a distinctive cognitive feature of the human brain which enables us to navigate both the real world and fictional story worlds. Drawing from literary and cognitive science approaches, this book investigates contemporary British author Ian McEwan’s differentiated portrayal of the imagination as a cognitive process, a result derived from that process or a vital social strategy that individuals use to daydream, mind-read, (self)deceive or manipulate. The book shows that McEwan’s novels reveal the complex positive and negative potential of the imagination and engage, tease and push to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity on a range of narrative levels.
Table of ContentsReality, fiction, imagination – British contemporary fiction – Ian McEwan – Cognitive science – Mindreading/theory of mind – Trauma fiction/contingency – Pathological forms of imagination – Self-deception and daydreaming – Scope and limits of imaginative freedom – Fictional (non-)confessions – Imagination and storytelling – Intellectual manipulation – Achieving atonement – Doubled rhetorical acts – Confessant and confessor – Unreliable narration – Ethical dimension of fiction – Speech acts
