Novel Notions

Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-138-86871-7
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 198 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 298 g

Reihe: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Medical, popular, and literary understanding about the imagination converged when Thomas Willis asserted that he had discovered the area of the brain that facilitated imagining. Taking this 'discovery' as paradigmatic, Novel Notions examines the reverberations of the medical investigation of the imagination in early British novels by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe. It argues that one of the novel's central features was a mapping of the terrain of human cognition, imagination, and creation, as a continuation of early modern medicine's account of perceptual experience. All the novels discussed reveal a simultaneous anxiety and excitement about medicine's understanding of the relationship between the imagination and perceptual experience through narrators who reflect on the nature of authoring.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kickel, Katherine E.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Author’s Note on Editions and Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction: Discovering the Early Modern Imagination Chapter One: Investigating the Imagination: The Arrival of a Cartesian Mediator in Science and Medicine Chapter Two: Hearing Imagining: Rhetorical Discordance in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year Chapter Three: Imagining a Novel’s Life: The Generative Power of Authorship in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones Chapter Four: Making Sense of Novel Reading: New Curiosity Concerning Synaesthesia in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy Chapter Five: Seeing Imagining: The Resurgence of A New Theory of Vision in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho Conclusion: An Enlightened Imagination? Notes Bibliography Index

Über Autor(innen)

Katherine E. Kickel