2 options
Novel notions : medical discourse and the mapping of the imagination in eighteenth-century English fiction / Katherine E. Kickel.
Van Pelt Library PR858.M42 K53 2007
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Kickel, Katherine E., 1975-
- Series:
- Literary criticism and cultural theory
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- English fiction--18th century--History and criticism.
- English fiction.
- Medicine in literature.
- Imagination in literature.
- Senses and sensation in literature.
- Mind and body in literature.
- Medicine--History--17th century.
- Medicine.
- History.
- Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731. Journal of the plague year.
- Defoe, Daniel.
- Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754. History of Tom Jones.
- Fielding, Henry.
- Sterne, Laurence, 1713-1768. Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman.
- Sterne, Laurence.
- Radcliffe, Ann, 1764-1823. Mysteries of Udolpho.
- Radcliffe, Ann.
- Physical Description:
- xii, 185 pages ; 24 cm.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Routledge, [2007]
- Summary:
- 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.
- Contents:
- Introduction : discovering the early modern imagination
- Investigating the imagination : the arrival of a Cartesian mediator in science and medicine
- Hearing imagining : rhetorical discordance in Daniel Defoe's A journal of the plague year
- Imagining a novel's life : the generative power of authorship in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
- Making sense of novel reading : new curiosity concerning synaesthesia in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
- Seeing imagining : the resurgence of A new theory of vision in Ann Radcliffe's The mysteries of Udolpho
- Conclusion : an enlightened imagination?
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-176) and index.
- ISBN:
- 041597948X
- 9780415979481
- OCLC:
- 77116764
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.