Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities

Jean-François Vernay is the author of Water from the Moon: Illusion and Reality in the Works of Australian Novelist Christopher Koch (2007), A Brief Take on the Australian Novel (2016), The Seduction of Fiction (2016), and La séduction de la fiction (2019).

"One of the fastest developing areas of science lies in discoveries about the human brain, about which we knew almost nothing only a few decades ago. Now the implications of that knowledge are spreading into other disciplines. The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities: Conversations Between Neurocognitive Research and Australian Literature is the first edited volume to explore the implications of this study for the reading and writing of Australian literature. Bridging neuroscience and the humanities, this diverse collection of essays adds to our understanding of issues such as empathy, voice, narrative persuasion, and the relation between our brains and body when enjoying aesthetic experiences. It provides a new direction in Australian literary and cultural studies."Dennis Haskell, AM, The University of Western Australia."Bringing together cognitive literary studies and Australian literary studies in a sustained and detailed way, this collection skilfully draws on a wide range of recent empirical and theoretical work on cognition, neuroscience, emotion, and sociality to address central issues and themes in Australian literary studies, among them the bearing of settler and indigenous discourse, experience, and histories on one another, the challenges of reconfiguring national identity in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural directions, the place of the wilderness and interactions with the environment in imaginative, affective life and ideological constructs, and the positioning of contemporary fiction in relation to a colonizing past and a globalized, post-national future."Donald R. Wehrs, Hargis Professor of English Literature, Auburn University, USA"Jean-François Vernay has put together a dynamic and convincing collection that shows how Australian literature can speak to contemporary concerns while engaging theories that try to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences. This book is also an encouraging portent that there is still a place for this sort of edited collection in Australian literary study. In a tough time for the field, it is encouraging to hear these vibrant and engaged voices."Nicholas Birns, Journal of Australian Studies

• Foreword by Paula LeveragePreface by Jean-François Vernay1 Cognitive Australian Literary Studies and the Creation of New Heuristic ConstellationsJean-François Vernay2 Narrative Empathy in Contemporary Australian Multiperspectival Novels: Cognitive Readings of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and Gail Jones’s Five Bells Lukas Klik3 Contemplating Affects: The Mystery of Emotion in Charlotte Wood’s The WeekendVictoria Reeve4 Affective Narratology, Cultural Memory, and Aboriginal Culture in Kim Scott’s Taboo Francesca Di Blasio5 Finding Voice: Cognition, Cate Kennedy’s "Cold Snap", and the Australian Bush TraditionLisa Smithies6 On Waiting upon: Speculations by an Australian Novelist on the Experience of Writing a Commissioned NovelSue Woolfe7 Performing a Neuro Lit Crit Analysis of Specky Magee in the Context of Obesity Bibliotherapy: Persuading Readers to Commit to ExerciseRocío Riestra-Camacho8 Feeling the Land: Embodied Relations in Contemporary Aboriginal FictionDorothee Klein