Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006.

“Why We Read Fiction” offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s “Clarissa,” Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment,” and Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” to Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.” Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative.

Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.

Lisa Zunshine is an associate professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of “Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England” (2005), editor of “Philanthropy and Fiction in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century” (2006) and co-editor of “Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson” (2006). Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, she will spend the 2007-08 academic year as a visiting scholar in the Department of Psychology at Yale University.