Novel notions : medical discourse and the mapping of the imagination in eighteenth-century English fiction / Katherine E. Kickel.
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...
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via Taylor & Francis) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Routledge,
©2007.
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| Series: | Literary criticism and cultural theory.
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| Subjects: |
| 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. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 185 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-176) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781003416999 1003416993 9781000944716 1000944719 9781000938661 1000938662 |