Free (Kindle/iTunes DRM-free) Why We Read Fiction [Academic Literary/Cultural Psych]

[ATDrake]

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel by literature scholar and University of Kentucky professor Lisa Zunshine (Wikipedia), presents her multi-disciplinary approach to Exactly What It Says In The Title, combining literary and cultural analysis in search of cognitive psychology insights, as part of the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series of such, free courtesy of the Ohio State University Press, who first published it in 2006.

This is really nifty, and doesn't just draw on the classical/literary literature that you might expect, but also pop media references from television and other sources, and tries its hand at analyzing different types of conventional genres, e.g. the mentality behind reading and writing murder mystery novels and the meaning behind the methodologies of famous fictional detectives.

Currently free @ iTunes (available to Canadians and many other worldwide stores when I spot-check, but with several major omissions such as Scandinavia and Japan which don't carry this title at all, and DRM-free to boot), and thence price-matched to selected regional Amazon stores (not available to Canadians). This doesn't seem to exist as an ebook in any of the other stores yet.

In case you were interested in this and wondering if it was worth the trouble of doing some hoop-jumping or not for if you don't already have an applicable iTunes install/Amazon account in the necessary region for it, there's a fairly lengthy PDF excerpt available directly at at the OSU Press webpage for this.

And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

Because I love quasi-academic non-fiction freebies on the relatively rare occasions that we get them, and this one just happens to combine three things I particularly love reading about in them: literature, culture, and science, to try and get an idea of how our brains work and interact with those of others via shared imaginative communicative mediums, so it's like three separately awesome things combining to form an even more awesome mega-thing, kind of like the way the Transformers* would have certain robots that would merge to form other robots.

And it's DRM-free!

Enjoy!

Description
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.

* Incidentally, my favourite Transformers are the Dinobots (Wikipedia) and Soundwave (Wikipedia), who was like the only one of them to have kids, of a sort.

[Dr. Drib]

Got it!

Thank you.

[ATDrake]

Just thought I'd mention that this has now been price-matched to free @ Amazon for Canadians & in the UK, and is DRM-free there as well.