Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute. She publishes primarily on the relationship between culture and technology (understood in the broadest terms) and her current projects sit within the interdisciplinary field of attention studies. See marionthain.org for more details. Atti Viragh is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University. His work has appeared in such journals as New Literary History, ELH, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. His work sets forth a new account of the birth of phenomenology by tracing its origins to Victorian literature and thought.

• Series PrefaceNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Mind, Body, Literature, and Psychology in the Later Nineteenth CenturyMarion Thain and Atti Viragh1. Cognitive Eating: George Gissing and the Victorian BrainworkerColton Valentine2. Fitzpiers the Empiricist: Malady and Seduction in The WoodlandersRachel Kravetz3. Alice Meynell’s Brain WavesGregory Tate4. Walter Pater’s Embodied Knowledge: In and Out PsychophysiologyBénédicte Coste5. Conversion-Crisis as a Marginal Experience in William James and Walter PaterDavid Sweeney Coombs6. Self-Taste, Embodiment, and Language in Gerard Manley HopkinsAmanda Paxton7. Neuron Doctrine in Fiction by Marie Corelli and Oscar WildeAnne Stiles8. Vernon Lee: Empathy, Mnemic Engrams, and Satanic AestheticsPamela K. GilbertIndex

These bold and probing essays brilliantly restore the dynamism and variousness of psychological debate in the final third of the nineteenth century, attuned as it was to the inescapable truth that minds are joined to bodies, while also wary of mechanistic science. What we now call embodied cognition was born in these febrile decades, and its emergence was enabled by writers as familiar as Hopkins, Gissing, Hardy and Vernon Lee but also by figures less visible in literary history such as Alice Meynell. This groundbreaking volume constructs new terms for grasping the invigorating late-Victorian swirl of literature, science and psychology.