Michael Austin

New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740 Michael Austin

New Testaments examines sequelization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from two perspectives: 1) the cognitive perspective, which explores the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of the contradictory desires to produce, and to resist, narrative closure; and 2) the biblical perspective, which explains that the connections between sequels and their original works were often constructed with the same tools that the culture used to forge the Old and New Testaments into a single, coherent narrative.