Mind, body, motion, matter : : eighteenth-century British and French literary perspectives / / edited by Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway.

• VerfasserIn: McMurran, Mary Helen, 1962-
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto ;, Buffalo ; : University of Toronto Press., 2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 pages) :; illustrations; digital, PDF 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."-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

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