1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910169655703321

Autore

McMurran Mary Helen <1962->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

University of Toronto Press

Toronto : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

1-4875-1141-8

1-4426-2225-3

1-4426-2224-5

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (vi, 293 pages) : illustrations; digital file(s)

Disciplina

820.9384

Soggetti

English literature - 18th century - History and criticism

French literature - 18th century - History and criticism

Philosophy in literature

Materialism in literature

Vitalism in literature

Aesthetics in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.