Challenging the notion that modernism is marked by an “inward turn” – a configuration of the individual as distinct from the world – this collection delineates the relationship between the mind and material and social systems, rethinking our understanding of modernism's representation of cognitive and affective processes. Through analysis of a variety of international novels, short stories, and films – all published roughly between 1890 and 1945 – the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the so-called “inward turn” of modernist narratives in fact reflects the necessary interaction between mind, self, and world that constitutes knowledge, and therefore precludes any radical split between these categories. The essays examine the cognitive value of modernist narrative, showing how the perception of objects and of other people is a relational activity that requires an awareness of the constant flux of reality. The Fictional Minds of Modernism explores how modernist narratives offer insights into the real, historical world not as a mere object of contemplation but as an object of knowledge, thus bridging the gap between classical narratology and modernist experimentation.

Challenging the notion that modernism is marked by an “inward turn” – a configuration of the individual as distinct from the world – this collection delineates the relationship between the mind and material and social systems, rethinking our understanding of modernism's representation of cognitive and affective processes. Through analysis of a variety of international novels, short stories, and films – all published roughly between 1890 and 1945 – the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the so-called “inward turn” of modernist narratives in fact reflects the necessary interaction between mind, self, and world that constitutes knowledge, and therefore precludes any radical split between these categories. The essays examine the cognitive value of modernist narrative, showing how the perception of objects and of other people is a relational activity that requires an awareness of the constant flux of reality. The Fictional Minds of Modernism explores how modernist narratives offer insights into the real, historical world not as a mere object of contemplation but as an object of knowledge, thus bridging the gap between classical narratology and modernist experimentation.

An anthology that traces the representation of consciousness and mind creation in English literature from 700 to the present.

Levay analyzes representations of the criminal in British and American modernism from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s.

Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to 'unknowling' by addressing the work of three experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, & William Faulkner.

"Readers create a continuing consciousness out of scattered references to a particular character and read this consciousness as an "embedded narrative" within the whole narrative of the novel. The combination of these embedded narratives forms the plot. This perspective on narrative enables us to explore hitherto neglected aspects of fictional minds such as dispositions, emotions, and action. It also highlights the social public and dialogic mind and the "mind beyond the skin." For example much of our thought is intermental, or joint, group or shared; even our identity is to an extent socially distributed.".

James Joyce’s evocations of his characters’ thoughts are often inserted within a commonplace that regards the mind as an interior space, referred to as the ‘inward turn’ in literary scholarship since the mid-twentieth century. Emma-Louise Silva reassesses this vantage point by exploring Joyce’s modernist fiction through the prism of 4E – or embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive – cognition. By merging the 4E framework with cognitive-genetic narratology, an innovative form of inquiry that brings together the study of the dynamics of writing processes and the study of cognition in relation to narratives, Modernist Minds: Materialities of the Mental in the Works of James Joyce delves into the material stylistic choices through which Joyce’s approaches to mind depiction evolved.