Why the Novel Happened: A Cognitive Explanation

Cognitively oriented literary studies, if they are to appeal to a broad array of literary scholars, will need to link cognition and culture. This essay brings together cognitive-psychological studies of the metarepresentational mind and of religious belief in order to offer an explanation of the nature and historical emergence of novelistic realism. It shows how novelistic realism, unlike other kinds of story, directly exercises what psychologist Alan Leslie calls the “decoupling mechanism” of the metarepresentational mind. And it argues that this kind of story takes on its specific power in the history of storytelling because of specific cultural change.