Alistair Fox 透过神经与认知科学的观点，针对文学与电影的表现手法提出一向理论，让我们更了解故事的起源以及人类对虚构世界的渴望。Fox 认为虚构文学是由情感及人类隐喻的能力所刻画而成的。文学和电影（动画）将情绪反应与大脑的认知区连结在一起。作者Fox大胆地将神经科学与精神分析连结在一起，透过研究虚构形式中的自述议题，将诠释性的经验作为达到个人情感平衡的方式。
 
好评
"Very rich argumentation that progressively constructs its object, shifting with much skill from the conceptual elaboration of its global perspective to the various concrete examples of works approached so to give it flesh and blood." —Raymond Bellour, film critic, theorist, and author of The Analysis of Film
 
关于作者
Alistair Fox 纽西兰Otago 大学的荣誉英语教授。他是Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema (IUP, 2011)一书的作者，也是Anne Gillain的书籍：François Truffaut: The Lost Secret (IUP, 2013)的译者。他和Raphaëlle Moine、Hilary Radner与Michel Marie一起编辑了Companion to Contemporary French Cinema。
 
目录
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Changing Configurations in Theories of Fictive Representation
2. Why Does Fictive Representation Exist?
3. The Wellsprings of Fictive Creativity
4. The Materials of Fictive Invention
5. The Informing Role of Fantasy
6. The Shaping of Fictive Scenarios by the Author: Motivations, Strategies, and Outcomes
7. The Exploitation of Generic Templates and Intertexts as Vehicles for Affect-Regulation
8. Theories of Reception in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
9. A Neuropsychoanalytic Theory of Reception
10. Intersubjective Attunement, Filiation and the Re-creative Process: Jules and Jim—from Henri-Pierre Roché to Francois Truffaut
11. The Conversion of Autobiographical Emotion into Symbolic Figuration: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
12. Tracking a Personal Myth through an Oeuvre: the Films of François Ozon
Conclusion
Filmography
Select Bibliography
Index