Imagination in Ian McEwan’s Fiction: A Literary and Cognitive Science Approach

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The imagination is a distinctive cognitive feature of the human brain which enables us to navigate both the real world and fictional story worlds. Drawing from literary and cognitive science approaches, this book investigates contemporary British author Ian McEwan’s differentiated portrayal of the imagination as a cognitive process, a result derived from that process or a vital social strategy that individuals use to daydream, mind-read, (self)deceive or manipulate. The book shows that McEwan’s novels reveal the complex positive and negative potential of the imagination and engage, tease and push to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity on a range of narrative levels.