Novel Notions

Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

Katherine E. Kickel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780415979481
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000938661
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author's Note on Editions and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Discovering the Early Modern Imagination
• Chapter One: Investigating the Imagination: The Arrival of a Cartesian Mediator in Science and Medicine
• Chapter Two: Hearing Imagining: Rhetorical Discordance in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year
• Chapter Three: Imagining a Novel's Life: The Generative Power of Authorship in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
• Chapter Four: Making Sense of Novel Reading: New Curiosity Concerning Synaesthesia in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
• Chapter Five: Seeing Imagining: The Resurgence of A New Theory of Visionin Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Conclusion: An Enlightened Imagination?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index