Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

AvMarion Thain,Atti Viragh,University of Edinburgh) Thain, Marion (Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute,Bilkent University) Viragh, Atti (Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature

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The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw the birth of psychology as a discipline. The question of the relationship between mind and body was a central topic of concern across an array of genres, media and textual forms during these years. In this collection we trace the role literature played in responding to fundamental questions within this interdisciplinary intersection. How do writers conceptualize perception, memory, sense-experience, understanding, empathy, cognition, and their relation to embodiment? What is the Victorian contribution to the new conceptions of the nature of thought and feeling developed by such figures as William James in America and Henri Bergson in France? Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature shows how writers grappled with pivotal intellectual and scientific developments of the nineteenth century and how these ideas transformed Victorian literature itself.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-04-30
Mått156 x 234 x 17 mm
Vikt444 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieNineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures
Antal sidor200
FörlagEdinburgh University Press
ISBN9781399521277

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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.