I. A. Richards is an influential figure in literary criticism but has rarely been thought of as someone who laid the foundations for cognitive stylistics. This book proposes that Richards was a "protocognitivist."

West argues that Richards anticipated many of the discipline's core aims, methods and assumptions. The book argues that the roots of cognitive psychology lie in early 20th-century psychology, when there was a focus on cognitive processes such as memory and learning, attention, categorisation, perception and consciousness. It was this cognitive psychology that Richards drew...