Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology
eBook - PDF

Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology

  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology

About this book

Curiosity about the human mind—what it is and how it functions—began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes are so elusive, they could be described only by means of metaphor. Michael Kearns, in this prize-winning study, examines the development of metaphors of the mind in psychological writings from Hobbes through William James and in fiction from Defoe through Henry James.

Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth, metaphors of the mind as a relatively simple entity, either mechanical or biological, dominated both those engaged in psychological theorizing and novelists ranging from Richardson and Smollett through Dickens and the Brontes.

In the nineteenth century, such psychologists as Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain conceived of the mind as a complex organism quite different from that embodied in earlier thinking, but their figurative language did not keep pace. The result was a tension between theoretical expression and actual discussion of mental phenomena

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Yes, you can access Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology by Michael S. Kearns in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. I. The Problem of Metaphors of Mind
  7. II. Metaphor Theory and Metaphors of Mind
  8. III. Corpuscular Thoughts, Tangible Minds: Eighteenth-Century Psychology and Fiction
  9. IV. Mind as Entity in Nineteenth-Century Psychology
  10. V Revealing Surfaces, Predictable Depths: Mind as Entity in Brontë and Dickens
  11. VI. Toward the Life of the Mind: James and Eliot Discover Sentience
  12. VII. Afterword: William James' Language of the Mind
  13. Works Cited
  14. Index