As critical junctures of discourse, beginnings are reflexive moments, highly charged with creating expectations and setting the reader's attitude towards a novel. Thereby they preserve the socio-representational climate of a particular historical moment. Assuming that the beginning of a work contains important cues that illuminate the specific quality of the fictional space and its relation to the non-fictional surroundings, this essay reviews cognitive frame conceptions for their heuristic value for a frame theory of literature. I suggest looking at framings that occur at the beginning of a work as culture-specific signposts which shed light on the historical discourse situation of fiction. In a case study of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing I will test the historicity of initial framings as interfaces between text, author, reader, and cultural context.As concepts that account for structures of expectations and provide guiding lines for interpretations, metaphors of frame and framing appear in a number of disciplines and fields of research. Frame conceptions are common in anthropology and sociology, psychology and psychotherapy, linguistics and the interdisciplinary research of cognitive science. This essay reviews important theoretical aspects of frame conceptions and discusses their relevance for the analysis of literary fiction. It expounds on the metaphorical notion of space and the sense of perspective that are two key features of frame conceptions.The notion of space, outlined by the constraints of a physical, social, or psychological setting, and the sense of perspective, implied in the alignment of this space, characterize my use of the concept 'frame' and my attempt to synthesize social and cognitive uses of the term. Accordingly, frames are understood as cognitive tools by which we navigate through our symbolic universe. They organize familiar patterns of knowledge to establish correspondences or 'mappings' that guide comprehension, ranging from basic construction of meaning to the creation of complex (psychological) realities. A frame implies a certain perspective that shapes the focus of our attention. Thus, like the frame of a painting, conceptual frames influence what we perceive and how we perceive things.Brought to you by | Carleton University OCUL Authenticated Download Date | 6/20/15 1:24 AM 2 On frame layers cf. also Collins (1988).