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.
| ISBN: | 9781138868717 |
| Publication date: | 27th February 2015 |
| Author: | Katherine E Katherine Kickel, Miami University, USA Kickel |
| Publisher: | Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis Ltd |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 198 pages |
| Series: | Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: general Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers |
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.
Novel Notions features in the following genres: Literary studies: general, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Novel Notions is available in Paperback, Hardback
Novel Notions was written by Katherine E Katherine Kickel, Miami University, USA Kickel and published by Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis Ltd
Novel Notions has 198 pages
Yes it is part of Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory series
£47.69