Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature - (Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures) by Marion Thain & Atti Viragh (Hardcover)

About the Book

Shows how late-Victorian writers develop new understandings of the relationship between cognition and embodiment.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.--Peter Garratt, Durham University