Vital Matters : : Eighteenth Century Views of Conception.Life * Death / / Mary Terrall, Helen Deutsch.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Deutsch, Helen,; Terrall, Mary,
• TeilnehmendeR: Terrall, Mary,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Eighteenth-century questions about the properties essential to life often explored the boundary between the physical world of the body and the immaterial world of the mind and soul. Locating materialism within the larger history of ideas, Vital Matters examines how and why eighteenth-century scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists questioned nature and its animating principles.In this volume, interdisciplinary essays by premier scholars in literary studies, art history, and the history of science and medicine analyse a wide range of subjects, including ghosts and funerary practices, dissection and digestion, automata, and monstrous births. Featuring new approaches to literary texts such as Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and paintings such as Girodet's Eternal Sleep, as well as new research on cases from the history of medicine and the history of science, Vital Matters reconsiders Enlightenment oppositions between body and mind, brain and soul, life and death, and the physical and the abstract.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction / Deutsch, Helen / Terrall, Mary -- 1. Living with Lucretius / Kramnick, Jonathan -- 2. Dismantl'd Souls: The Verse Epistle, Embodied Subjectivity, and Poetic Animation / Deutsch, Helen -- 3. Girodet and the Eternal Sleep / Chua, Kevin -- 4. Tristram Shandy and the Art of Conception / Stephanson, Raymond -- 5. Material Impressions: Conception, Sensibility, and Inheritance / Terrall, Mary -- 6. Misconceiving the Heir: Mind and Matter in the Warming Pan Propaganda / Harol, Corrinne -- 7. From the Man-Machine to the Automaton-Man: The Enlightenment Origins of the Mechanistic Imagery of Humanity / Kang, Minsoo -- 8. The 'Fair Savage': Empiricism and Essence in Sarah Fielding's The History of Ophelia / Thompson, Helen -- 9. Food and Feeling: 'Digestive Force' and the Nature of Morbidity in Vitalist Medicine / Williams, Elizabeth A. -- 10. The Divine Touch, or Touching Divines: John Hunter, David Hume, and the Bishop of Durham's Rectum / Chaplin, Simon -- 11. The Value of a Dead Body / Guerrini, Anita -- 12. Noticing Death: Funeral Invitations and Obituaries in Early Modern Britain / Clymer, Lorna -- Contributors -- Index