Jean-François Vernay is the author of five monographs including The Seduction of Fiction: A Plea for Putting Emotions Back into Literary Interpretation (2016), translated into Mandarin by Dr Jun Feng, La séduction de la fiction (2019), and Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness (Routledge, 2021). He has also edited a Routledge volume: The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities: Conversations Between Neurocognitive Research and Australian Literature, published in 2021. His monographs have been taken up for translation into English, Arabic, Korean, and Mandarin. Donald R. Wehrs, Hargis Professor of English Literature at Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA, is editor or co-editor of five collections, most recently Cultural Memory: From the Sciences to the Humanities (Routledge, 2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism (2017). He is author of four monographs, most recently Ethical Sense and Literary Significance: Deep Sociality and the Cultural Agency of Imaginative Discourse (Routledge, 2024), as well as essays on literary theory, Shakespeare, postcolonial studies, 18th-century British fiction, and comparative literature. Isabelle Wentworth is a lecturer in English at the Australian Catholic University. Her research is in cognitive literary criticism, particularly within the contemporary literature of Australia and South America. Her work has been recently published in Poetics Today, Textual Practice, Cognitive Systems Research, and Hispanic Studies Review, among other international journals. Her first monograph, Catching Time: Interaction, Cognition, and Temporality in the Novel (Routledge) was published in 2024.
"""The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature promises to stand out among emotion studies for its simultaneous respect for scientific research and socio-historical context. Taking diverse approaches to emotions labeled “negative,” its scholars engage the latest cognitive, philosophical, and historical studies of emotions without giving any one field the final word."" - Laura Otis, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English Emerita, Emory University, USA “This collection draws a fascinating affective map of the postcolonial condition through a range of emotional conflicts articulated in literature that stretches across modernity all the way to our globalized and digitized present. Given the historical realities of power and oppression, this collection on the negative is a richly productive step both along the planetary terrain of postcolonial literary study and the restless archive of critical theory.” -Saikat Majumdar Professor of English and Creative Writing, Ashoka University, India"