Ready for a Handbook? Cognitive Literary Studies on a Threshold [Lisa Zunshine (ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, 2015.
Maybe the cover image tells us more about the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies than intended. Georges de la Tour's Le Tricheur a l'as de carreau is a painting in the wake of Caravaggio showing the three major temptations according to 17th century moral standards: gambling, wine, and lust. If one assumes that literature is a kind of gambling, cheating, and a dangerous lust in itself, the choice of cover makes sense. If not, then it's more or less a stopgap solution. It is not (yet) an independent area of research like cognitive linguistics has become. Besides that, the term >cognitive< is in literary criticism often only loosely used and one might think cognitive literary studies are just the current next turn in criticism. How could one find an image representing such a blurred area? It seems to be difficult even for a publishing house like Oxford University Press. The problem of the cover image is maybe only of anecdotal interest. However, the stopgap solution of the cover image points to the question, whether cognitive literary studies are already an area a handbook could encompass? After taking a closer look at the Oxford Handbook, the short answer is: Cognitive literary studies is still not an area in its own right, rather the Handbook presents a vivid and inspiring field of diverse and often tentative approaches, which share some common notions, practices, and concepts, one could summarise as >cognitive< With this I have jumped a long way ahead. Let's start from the beginning.