The term poetics goes back to Aristotle's treatise on tragedy and stands for the "critical and analytical treatment of poetry" where poetry is "the general name for literary expressions in diverse forms" (Zhang 2011 : 631-632; see also Reed 2012Reed : 1058Reed -1059. In this sense poetics is another name for literary criticism or literary theory. Culler ( 2002 ) argues, however, that the term poetics specifi cally denotes the kind of literary analysis that focuses on principles of literary meaning production-on "devices, conventions and strategies" (vii)-and not just on interpretation per se. Culler's specifi cation certainly applies to Aristotle and much literary analysis that has called itself poetics since the 1970s (see, e.g., the journal Poetics Today ). In 1992 Tsur coined the term cognitive poetics (CP) to describe the kind of poetic analysis he intends to pursue-a poetics that attends to principles of cognition, including principles of perception, emotion, attention, memory, imaging, and language understanding (see also Tsur 2002 : 280-281). Tsur's work focuses on poetry in the strict sense (i.e., poems) yet is part of a broader fi eld of cognitive poetics (or cognitive stylistics, or cognitive literary theory) that focuses on literature in general.Broadly speaking, then, cognitive poetics is the interdisciplinary endeavor to understand the poetic effects or aesthetic qualities of literary texts as products of interactions between the human mind (and its cognitive principles) and literary texts with their specifi c makeup. Cognitive poetics investigates topics as diverse as narrativity, mechanisms of empathy and immersion, distancing effects and defamiliarization, the nesting of perspectives in narrative fi ction (e.g., 'metarepresentation'), cognitive universals of literature, humor and irony, poetic metaphors, mental imagery and emotion, linguistic mechanisms of creativity, effects of form-meaning similarity (i.e., iconicity), meter, fi gure-ground perception, and so on (for a broad range of topics, see, e.g.,