Human Minds and Animal Stories

"frames the issues of reader empathy, creating a template for accumulating and coding the data of how people come to care about something, and how reading may modify their behavior" --Randy Malamud, Department of English, Georgia State University, USA, ANTHROZOS, 2021 "Apart from offering a gripping real-life detective narrative, the publication presents an introduction to novel research regarding the experimental study of literature[for] anyone looking for inspiration and hard scientific evidence to create narratives that can make a difference in the world." --Luiza Dubicka, Diggit magazine, 2020 "Human Minds and Animal Stories is an outstanding book ... extremely well researched, the ideas are clearly presented, and the individual chapters also serve as a perfect introduction to the field of empirical literary studies." -- Jan Alber, Scientific Study of Literature (Vol. 11:1 (2021), pp. 142146.

Wojciech Maecki is assistant professor at the University of Wrocaw, Poland. He specializes in literary theory, ecocriticism, animal studies, American pragmatism, aesthetics, and the empirical study of literature. He is the author and editor of five books and of numerous articles published in journals such as The Oxford Literary Review, Poetics, Angelaki, and PLoS One. Piotr Sorokowski is associate professor and head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Wrocaw, Poland. He has published more than seventy research articles related to evolutionary, cultural, and social psychology, including in Nature, Evolution and Human Behavior, and Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. His work has been discussed by the media all over the world, including BBC, CNN, Time, and The New Yorker. Bogusaw Pawowski is head of the Department of Human Biology at the University of Wrocaw, Poland. He deals with human behavior and preferences in relationship to body morphology and physiology. He has published more than eighty papers in top journals in his field (e.g. in Nature, PNAS, Proc. Roy. Soc. B., Current Anthropology) and dozens of book chapters. He is the President of the Polish Society for Human and Evolution Studies (PTNCE). Marcin Cieski is professor of literary history and comparative literature and the Dean of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Wrocaw. His research interests include eighteenth-century and contemporary literature. He has authored and edited more than 150 publications, including The Landscapes of the Enlightened; Polish Enlightenment Literature and the European Tradition; and Polish Humanism and Communities.

Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 Texts, Statistics, and Deception: On Our Investigative Method Chapter 2 A Monkey, a Book, and Facebook, or How to Catch a Story in the Act Chapter 3 Does It Matter If It Is True? On Slaughterhouses, Fiction, and Non-Fiction Chapter 4 Does It Matter How It Is Told? On Species, Stylistics, and Voices Chapter 5 Does It Matter Who It Is About? On Chimpanzees, Lizards, and Other Main Characters Chapter 6 How Does It Work? From Readerly Pleasure to Animal Cruelty Chapter 7 How Long Will It Work? A Short Chapter on Attitudinal Impact Over Time Conclusions, Speculations, and Prospects Appendices Index