Mind, Body, Motion, Matter : : Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives / / Mary Helen McMurran, Alison Conway.

• HerausgeberIn: Conway, Alison,
• Author: McMurran, Mary Helen,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2018]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (vi, 293 pages) :; illustrations; digital file(s)

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century's two predominant approaches to the natural world - mechanistic materialism and vitalism - in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- MIND, BODY, MOTION, MATTER -- Introduction / McMurran, Mary Helen -- Part One: Pre-Reflective Experience -- 1. Hogarth's Practical Aesthetics / Mack, Ruth -- 2. Presence of Mind: An Ecology of Perception in Eighteenth-Century England / Kramnick, Jonathan -- 3. Reading Locke after Shaftesbury: Feeling Our Way Towards a Postsecular Genealogy of Religious Tolerance / Alvarez, David -- 4. Rethinking Superstition: Pagan Ritual in Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages / McMurran, Mary Helen -- Part Two: Materialisms -- 5. Defoe on Spiritual Communication, Action at a Distance, and the Mind in Motion / Landreth, Sara -- 6. The Persistence of Clarissa / Ellenzweig, Sarah -- 7. The Early Modern Embodied Mind and the Entomological Imaginary / Tunstall, Kate E. -- 8. Diderot's Brain / Stalnaker, Joanna -- Conclusion: Can Aesthetics Overcome Instrumental Reason? The Need for Judgment in Mandeville's Fable of the Bees / Soni, Vivasvan -- Contributors -- Index