Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction / Edition 1

by Katherine E. Kickel

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415979481
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/08/2007
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Author's Note on Editions and Abbreviations     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction: Discovering the Early Modern Imagination     1
Investigating the Imagination: The Arrival of a Cartesian Mediator in Science and Medicine     17
Hearing Imagining: Rhetorical Discordance in Daniel Defoe's$dA Journal of the Plague Year     39
Imagining a Novel's Life: The Generative Power of Authorship in Henry Fielding's   Tom Jones     67
Making Sense of Novel Reading: New Curiosity Concerning Synaesthesia in Laurence Sterne's   Tristram Shandy     89
Seeing Imagining: The Resurgence of A New Theory of Vision in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho     113
Conclusion: An Enlightened Imagination?     139
Notes     145
Bibliography     169
Index     177