Eighteenth-century vitalism : bodies, culture, politics / Catherine Packham.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Packham, Catherine.

Series:

Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism and cultures of print

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Great Britain.

Vitalism in literature.

Literature and society--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Literature and society.

History.

Nature in literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 251 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

Vitalism is usually associated with Romantic theories of nature, but the supposition of a 'vital principle' or life-force recurred throughout eighteenth-century natural philosophy, to counter the inadequacy of mechanism to understand the operation of natural life. This book traces the persistent presence of a language of vital nature not only in eighteenth-century science, but in literary and philosophical writing too: in moral philosophy, theories of sensibility and political economy, and in the radical journalism and women's writing of the 1790s. It explores the influence of the Scottish vitalist physiology of Robert Whytt and others on writers and thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin, John Hunter, John Thelwall and Mary Wollstonecraft. In doing so, it shows the centrality of vitalism to eighteenth-century accounts of the body, nature, matter and life, and offers a new way of understanding the relationship between eighteenth-century science and culture and that of the Romantic period. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Writing the Body in the Scottish Enlightenment

1 Forms of Enlightenment: Embodied Beings in Eighteenth-Century Scotland 25

2 Generating Sympathy: Sensibility, Animation and Vitality in Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft 52

3 Labouring Bodies in Political Economy: Vitalist Physiology and the Body Politic 83

Part II Enlightenment in the 1790s: The Scottish Legacy

4 Enlightenment Legacies and Cultural Radicalism: Physiology and Politics in the 1790s 111

Part III Vitalism, Animation, Culture

5 Animated Nature: Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry and Politics of Vital Matter, 1789-1803 147

6 Animation and Vitality in Women's Writing of the 1790s 175.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230276185

0230276180

OCLC:

758982860

Online:

Cover image