A prehistory of cognitive poetics: neoclassicism and the novel

Neoclassical poetics and the rise of the novel

Beating the bounds of the rules in Incognita

"Manners, passions, unities"

Neoclassicism and the sciences

The situational logic of vraisemblance

Cognitive moves

"Successful solutions"

Vraisemblance now

Poetic justice. Samuel Richardson and the project of poetic justice

Virtue rewarded

Altruistic punishers in B-Hall

Pamela-Shamela-Anti-Pamela

The trials of Clarissa

Editing the social contract

Lovelace's happy endings

Poetic justice at the limits

Ann Radcliffe and the abdication of the superpunisher

Comeuppance clockworks

Enter the uncanny

The supernatural and superpunishers

The unities. Johnson's Rasselas and the best possible storyworld

Rasselas, the imagination, and the unities

Event cognition, spatialization and the conceptual shape of the storyworld

Closure in Abissinia

Utopian reasoning in Mercier's L'an 2440 and Madden's Memoirs of the twentieth century

Poetics and politics

The cognitive estrangements of Utopia

The idea of progress and intertemporal bargaining in Utopian fiction

A unified Utopia

The dramatic passages of The Castle of Otranto

Where the bodies are

The return of Racine

Embodied experience in the novel

Decorum. Henry Fielding's probability design

"Sagacious readers"

Decorum and surprise

A hero "certainly born to be hanged"

The Female Quixote and the probability of romance

The Querelle de Miss Groves

Educating readers

Arabella's wager

John Cleland versus the novel

Building a social world in Mrs Mercier's Academy

The predictable novel

Love, duty, and the end of curiosity

Conclusion: Explorations in the prehistory of cognitive poetics.