This book is ambitious, I would say, even fearless. With examples taken mostly from English Renaissance literature and letters, Beecher explores some topics in psychology (e.g., selfhood, memory, emotions, intentionality) as they are redescribed in current cognitive science. Texts have been chosen to illustrate the universals hypothesized (with greater and lesser assurance) within recent neo-Darwinist claims about the persistent power of brain structures formed by the early evolutionary history of our species. In a long and closely argued introduction Beecher defends the centrality to literary study of the interface between readers with evolved minds and the texts written by people with the same kind of evolved minds: “brain meets art created in the image of the brain” (352). Writing with good humor and modesty about contentious topics, he argues the value of merging literary and cognitive studies, anticipates readers’ objections, responds where possible, and acknowledges that the available answers aren’t always satisfying. When he has difficulty aligning scientific hypotheses—for example, about laughter (and tickling)—with what he knows about comedy, he admits the need to keep working.

For a while now, some humanities-trained critics have been interested in tucking into a scientific pie, hungry to restore the dignity of their profession, following a debilitating struggle with deconstructive skepticism. Some, unfortunately, have been insufficiently skeptical of the claims made by neo-Darwinians for the endurance of behaviors based on processing strategies evolved in the context of early hominid life. The evidence of epigenetic change is insufficiently recognized. In its most general form, the evolutionary hypothesis is undeniable: the inherited architecture of human brains within human bodies constrains the ways we think. However, the level of generalization here is so high that many literary scholars find the claims made about literature so reductive as to be uninteresting. And because literary criticism is traditionally invested in the specifics that differentiate texts and authors, social scientists haven’t often been interested in what we do or how we theorize it.

The effort to produce a satisfying interdisciplinarity thus comes mostly from literary scholars. The importance of Beecher’s book is that he doesn’t give up the work. In spite of the well-grounded attacks (to which I have myself contributed) on the excesses of Darwinian literary criticism, he keeps the discussion open, enlarging it, in fact, by connecting important aspects of the debate to philosophical and theological issues that have some literary history. His discussion of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is particularly interesting in this respect. Beecher, furthermore, is alert to the fraught but crucially important project of matching up new and old vocabularies. I particularly like his refit of Coleridge’s familiar claim about the suspension of disbelief: he argues in convincing detail that “we do not suspend disbelief in the less than real, but impose full belief in the less than real” (343). I find his discussion about genre and archetypes suggestive. He discusses these familiar topics in connection to twentieth-century psychology and current ethical thinking. He asks, for example, in chapter 3, “On the Emotional Intentionality of Criminal Protagonists,” whether the genres of comedy and tragedy are universals and how they connect to issues of free will, intentionality, and criminal action. He asks whether human brains allow or even predict a tragic view of life, and suggests that “tragedy is brain science before its time” (28).

His generally defensive tone may still be necessary in literary studies, but his repeated dismissal of the arguments made for cultural construction are unwarranted, as is his unquestioning acceptance of the idea that brain function is binary. He makes insufficient use of the recent discussions of embodiment and social intelligence, and none at all of brain-imaging studies, although both have fed into a set of neurophysiological hypotheses that would serve him well. The predictive processing hypothesis, for example—the subject of a book by cognitive philosopher Andy Clark (Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind [2016])—would make sense of his inconclusive description of suspense. He could have supported his discussion of abstraction with the type-token distinctions made for grammar by Ray Jackendoff (Semantics and Cognition [1983]).