This collection adopts a cognitive approach to the study of drama. Analyses range from the medieval stage to 21st century Anglophone drama and provide a cognitive reading of characterisation, interiority, performativity, decoding strategies, empathy, immersion, reader manipulation and audience control.

Contents: Monika Fludernik: Consciousness in Drama: A Cognitive Approach – Eva Zettelmann: Drama and the Representation of Fictional Minds – Gabriella Mazzon: Strategic Communication of Pathos and Suffering in Verbal and Visual Medieval Culture – Elke Mettinger: «Now is this golden crown like a deep well» - from a Cognitive Point of View – Sabine Coelsch-Foisner: : Personality and Personality Building in Shakespeare’s Tragedy and Verdi’s Opera – Michael Raab: The Trap: Productions of Shakespeare’s Play in England, Germany, Austria and Switzerland – Christa Knellwolf King: Aimé Césaire’s Subversion of the Imperial Scripts of Shakespeare’s – Dieter Fuchs: The Script of the Body and the Soul in and : the ‘Cognitive Turn’ from Restoration Drama to Sentimental Fiction – Caterina Grasl: The (Im)Possible Worlds of Joe Orton: A Cognitive Approach to – Bernhard Reitz: «I understand you not, my lord.» - Problems of Cognition and Perception in Tom Stoppard’s Plays – Wolfgang J. Lippke: John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy - A Cognitive Approach – Ewald Mengel: Pinter’s One-Act Plays , , and in the Light of Conceptual Blending Theory – Merle Tönnies: Between Authenticity and Objectification: Narrating the Self in Contemporary British Drama – Eckart Voigts: «Dennis is a Liar» - Mendacity in the Plays of Dennis Kelly – Christopher Innes: Breaking the Boundaries of Narrative: Post-Dramatic Story-Telling – Peter Zenzinger: Parapsychic Phenomena in Early Twentieth-Century American Drama.