Marco Caracciolo is a postdoctoral researcher in the English department of the University of Freiburg in Germany. He is the author of The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach and the coauthor (with psychologist Russell Hurlburt) of A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Spiders on Drugs: A Prologue Introduction: Minding Characters 1. Patterns of Cognitive Dissonance 2. Two Child Narrators 3. Madness between Violence and Insight 4. A Strange Mood 5. Tales of Rats and Pigs 6. Obsessive Narrators, Unstable Knowledge Coda: Uses of the Character-Centered Illusion Notes Works Cited Index

“The book’s argument is as complex as it is ambitious and very much on the front lines of current work in reception, reader-response, cognitive literary study, and narratology. . . . It should have a strong market not only among narratologists and cognitive literary theorists, but a wide range of literary theorists of many stripes.”-H. Porter Abbott, professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative“The particular approach, methodology, and corpus make this contribution quite innovative and yield valuable insights and results.”-RÜdiger Heinze, professor of American literary and cultural studies at the University of Brunswick–Institute of Technology in Germany