"Cognitive Spaces and Perspective in Literature is a major contribution to cognitive literary studies, carefully argued while asking completely new questions and answering them. Drawing on the narratological tradition, cognitive poetics, and theories of visual perception, the book balances cognitive universals with historical specificities. Starting from Jane Eyre, and demonstrating that the same general principles hold, we are offered new perspectives in particular on Beckett and Banville, via realist fiction and modernism. We see the city in a new way, as a kind of externalized interior space. The account of Beckett's prose 'impressionism' as the 'tuning out of saliency' is worth the entrance price alone. The book presents a new theory of narrative production and explores the gap between fast thinking and slow writing, to formulate a theory of syntactic deceleration." (Nigel Fabb, Emeritus Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Strathclyde, UK) "Spatiality studies in literature have grown increasingly important in recent years. Unfortunately, work in that area has rarely addressed the empirically-grounded, cognitive scientific research which has so greatly increased our understanding of the psychology of space.

In this context, a literary study that draws on the data and theories of current neuroscience--and Liz Finnigan's is just such a study--constitutes a particularly welcome addition to the ongoing dialogue on this important topic." (Patrick Colm Hogan, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Connecticut, USA).