4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction

This monograph argues that the early English novel's gripping, immersive style stems from its engagement with "4E cognition"—embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended cognition. Analyzing works by Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces how physical states, gestures, and emotional excitement in prose relate to this cognitive framework. The book connects these literary techniques to eighteenth-century media ecologies, including letter writing, book learning, and theatricality. It proposes that the novel functioned as a "lifeworld technology," feeling real through integration into embodied experience rather than through nineteenth-century realism. This perspective revises traditional accounts of the novel's rise and opens new avenues for historically situated cognitive literary studies.

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Abstract

Abstract The early novel developed modes of writing that are considered gripping and immersive, because they foreground physical states, meaningful gestures, and emotional excitement. This monograph shows how these changes relate to “embodied” and “enactive” cognition, “embed” themselves into the cultural and material contexts, and “extend” readers’ thoughts. In an investigation of works from Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney, it traces the ways in which such “4E cognition” can contribute to a new perspective on stylistic and narrative changes in eighteenth-century fiction. The embodied dimension of literary language is then related to the media ecologies of letter writing, book learning, and theatricality in the eighteenth century. As the novel feeds off and into these social and material contexts, it comes into its own as a lifeworld technology that might not answer to standards of nineteenth-century realism but that feels real because it is integrated into the lifeworld and its embodied experiences. Together with the issue of realism, this book revisits traditional understandings of the “rise of the novel” and earlier historical perspectives in cognitive literary studies. And the perspective from 4E cognition, it is argued, opens links to book history and media ecologies that can launch historically situated cognitive approaches to literature.