On the back of his latest edited collection of Australian cognitive literary criticism, Jean-François Vernay has produced his own contribution to the field, Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness (2021). Both in his literature review and his own analyses, Vernay paints an exciting picture of the present and future of Australian cognitive literary studies, with each chapter taking a different cognitively informed approach against the backdrop of dominant paradigms in the sciences of the mind: embodied and affective cognition. The work covers an impressive range of texts (from literature of the margins to mainstream popular authors) and approaches (including cognitive historicism, affect studies, and reader reception). This eclectic assortment makes no unified argument but rather models different aspects of the field, and the various kinds of knowledge produced by juxtaposing literary and scientific theory.The book begins with a general introduction to cognitive criticism. Vernay describes a discipline premised on cognition’s relationship to embodiment, action, and affect, and interested in how the cognitive sciences help us to read, understand, interpret, and appreciate literature. The overview is followed by a diachronic review of cognitive studies of Australian literary criticism. This introductory chapter conveys an appreciation of the scope and interdisciplinarity of the field, encompassing areas across both the arts and sciences: theater, visual arts, literature, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. The introduction is also a bit of a “how to,” in that it guides critics in cognitive approaches, including a list of texts, which lend themselves to cognitive analysis, from the neuronovel, to crime fiction, to modernism. However, this list is not prescriptive—Vernay acknowledges that cognitive criticism can be a productive entry point to any text, across the fiction–nonfiction spectrum. His survey of the field is useful for anyone just starting out, or taking stock, of the state of the field of cognitive literary criticism in Australia.The first chapter is a study of the cognitive appeal of books’ appearance through the lens of The Book Thief’s Liesel Meminger. Vernay chooses this focal character for her metafictional love of books as a nonprofessional reader—an inverted reflection of the literary critic studying Zusak’s text. Through both cognitive theory and fictional evidence, Vernay shows how Liesel’s sensory experiences of books conflate different forms of consuming (a literal and idiomatic appetite for new books), demonstrating how the appearance and feel of books themselves are integrally involved in producing sensory, cognitive, anticipatory pleasure, able to activate various hedonic centers in the brain simultaneously. This capacity is, he points out, reproduced in the appealing covers of The Book Thief itself, so that we mirror the emotional response of its namesake when we encounter the book in stores or libraries. Delving a little deeper, Vernay considers that the ambivalent relationship Liesel develops with books after witnessing atrocities in the Nazi regime is a form of scapegoating: books, and the words they contain, are blamed for the violence done in their name. Despite this almost psychoanalytical transference, Liesel’s continued attachment to books is, Vernay suggests, explained by the nature of human–object relationships, or the “natural attachments humans have to objects” (in terms of sensory pleasure and associated memories). This connection makes Liesel hold on to the books despite the danger of possessing them. This opening chapter is consonant with theories of the “material turn” in literature, and—despite some overly binary claims about the importance of the book as physical object (in contrast to a “repository of stories” [28]1)—Vernay’s argument nicely highlights the complexity of our embodied encounters with books.The next chapter tackles the bildungsroman through the works of C. J. Koch’s work. It does an interesting job of drawing together scholars of the bildung (Karl Morgenstern Françoise Dolto, Arnold van Gennep, among others)—including anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and literary critics—to produce an argument that satisfyingly marries structural accounts of narrative to cognitive accounts of mind, as each moves through analogous stages of development. Vernay notes that in both cases, what occurs is not so much a formation (the completion of a predetermined trajectory) but a transformation, as the character/individual’s past self is displaced by a new self, constructed by the vagaries of their interactions with the environment in dialogue with their biology. Vernay investigates a similar process within the reader of the bildungsroman, questioning whether the reader is transformed (not only in the immediate experience of reading but in both the mid-term and long-term stages) by the process of reading these coming-of-age novels. The difficulties in quantifying this readerly transformation, including the multitude of confounding factors, create an empirical problem outside the scope of literary criticism. Ultimately, Vernay leaves this question open, but expresses optimism about the transformative potential of literature.The next chapter, on mindstyle and neurodivergence, gives a competent overview of the depiction of literary Asperger’s in the Graeme Simsion Rosie trilogy. The chapter spends valuable time teasing out the tension between real life Asperger’s and the literary Asperger’s figure. In relation to Simsion’s trilogy, there are qualifications around the fact that the author is not autistic, and the narrative—shaped by various ethical and aesthetic drives—is not a study of the Asperger’s experience, but a romantic comedy that aims to raise awareness about the positive “potentialities” of autistic cognitive styles. In addition to this theorizing, it would have been fascinating to hear more about how literary Asperger’s is stylistically constructed, beyond direct dialogue or report. Simsion’s works, as popular fiction, do not deal in subtleties, and so perhaps more of a genealogy of the Asperger’s character in literature may have been useful here. This could have opened up an interesting discussion around literary Asperger’s and Semino’s concept of mindstyle (which Vernay references), to more deeply explore the textual patterns used to evoke this particular “cognitive style” in literature.In the following chapter, Vernay comes into his own as he analyzes the erotics of writing and reading, taking a psychoanalytic lens to consider the conflation of the sexual and creative impulse, and the consumption of bodies and stories. This chapter gives an interesting overview of erotic Australian fiction from the 1960s to today through the lens of the multiple designations of the word “arousal” (including their interactions with capitalist motives). A cognitive perspective highlights the overlap between sex and curiosity (and thus the drives behind our relations with both people and novels), which, according to Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues, share certain neural circuits. In reading erotic fiction, the overlap becomes explicit, producing the desire to know not just what, but who, a character is doing. This is followed by another fruitful discussion of literature and the body: a study of embodied trauma in Indigenous literature. Vernay looks at Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius and Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. The complex narrative strategies of each text do not straightforwardly invite the reader to empathetically share in the experience but rather invite witness and recognition. Vernay presents an insightful representation of the deep interpenetration of mind/body/culture, which, as 4E cognition has been arguing for the last few decades, is impossible to detangle, given the enculturated nature of our embodied minds.This cognitive-cultural perspective is continued in the last section, on cognition and emotions, as Vernay traces the complex web of ideological critique and embodied affect. It begins with a comparative analysis of Peter Polites and Christos Tsolkias’s depiction of “Angry Gay Men,” particularly looking at anger across class, race, and gender lines. This moves into the mind of the reader in the final chapter, returning us to the discussion in the first chapter of professional and nonprofessional readers, and how they differently triangulate emotional responses to the text and its authorial figure. Here Vernay uses the controversy around Helen Dale’s The Hand That Signed the Paper to discuss the productivity of moral emotions, such as indignation and disgust, in our interpretation of texts.To give Vernay’s argument full consideration, some historical details should be recounted around the scandal of Dale’s novel. Though published as a fictional work, it was marketed as having a historical basis through paratextual features such as the Ukrainian pseudonym, Demidenko, under which it was published; the prefaces of certain editions (1995), which declared the historical context of the story to be truthful; as well as epitext such as interviews. These extratextual elements featured explicit claims that Demidenko accurately represented Ukrainian sentiment toward the Soviet regime, a story that was implied to have emerged from her family history. It was later revealed that she was not Ukrainian and had not accurately represented this historical period, and furthermore had encoded anti-Semitic views in her text. This was certainly a complex case, in which the nature of creative licence, truth in fiction, and the relationship between text and author all came into question. In such a complex case, it’s possible Vernay may have taken an overly simplistic line: he argues that critics of Helen, particularly those that objected to the anti-Semitism of her work, committed the referential fallacy (confusing fictional claims with claims about the real world). Vernay suggests that such critics were “clouded” (118) by their own emotional response to the case, which may have impacted on their “mental clarity” (118). I think this chapter deviates from the earlier accounts of emotion, fictionality, and the role of the critic that Vernay deploys in the book, and the inconsistency weakens his argument here. Earlier in the book is an acknowledgment of the social and political role of both literature and literary criticism, explicitly pointing to their ability to have real world effects, and to reflect and refract our world in productive ways. For example, in the chapter on Indigenous writings, Vernay points out the role of the text and the surrounding sphere of criticism in developing empathy and promoting social activism and mutual understanding. Here, however, he suggests that literature should be considered a closed semiotic system, in which “fiction is bereft of extralinguistic referential properties and therefore makes no reference to anything other than itself” (117). Thus, any emotional response to literature, particularly critical emotional responses such as anger about a certain perspective presented in the work, are simply a result of confusion. Vernay asks, “how could anyone feel indignant at literary creations based on no extralinguistic reference or on pretended reference?” (121). It would have been interesting to hear Vernay’s take on the potential tension between the cognitive criticism of the rest of the book and what Vernay calls the “no-reference theory” espoused by the French new realists and Vernay himself in this chapter.2Furthermore, Vernay suggests the critics who condemn such ideological perspectives as the anti-Semitism of Demidenko’s novel are performing a kind of censorship: “anti-Dimidenko critics pressing charges of anti-Semitism clearly deny literature’s right to represent and fathom a diverse range of moral stances” (116). This claim itself denies literary criticism’s function (performed by both professional and nonprofessional literary critics): to reflect on our cultural output and the ideologies embedded within it, saying things about the work that it cannot—and, importantly, would not, necessarily—say about itself. This is a process that, as the cognitive reader response theories—e.g., from Lisa Zunshine, whom Vernay references earlier—emphasize, does not require the critic to be “detached . . . dispassionate” or “objective” (120).3 Vernay’s suggestion that only the nonprofessional would be “taken in by the illusion” of literature enough to feel an emotional response feels hard to square with his scholarship in the remainder of the book. However, on the whole, in this chapter Vernay makes many astute comments on the ability of emotion to ethically charge our reading, and there is an interesting critique of criticism—its tendency to conflate the author with his or her work, and an inability to detangle moral issues from aesthetic ones. These are valuable reminders in the age of outrage that we currently live in.Overall, Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature, in both its depth and scope, makes a valuable contribution to cognitive literary criticism. Alongside his earlier anthology, The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities (2021), this present work both promotes and substantially develops cognitive studies of Australian literature, which is shaping up to be a major player in the critical landscape of the twenty-first century.