Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature

by Marion Thain (Editor), Atti Viragh (Editor)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399521277
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2025
Series:	Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She publishes primarily on the relationship between culture and technology (understood in the broadest terms) and her current projects sit within the interdisciplinary field of attention studies. See marionthain.org for more details.

Atti Viragh is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University. His work has appeared in such journals as New Literary History, ELH, and English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. His work sets forth a new account of the birth of phenomenology by tracing its origins to Victorian literature and thought.

Table of Contents

Series Preface
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Mind, Body, Literature, and Psychology in the Later Nineteenth Century
Marion Thain and Atti Viragh
1. Cognitive Eating: George Gissing and the Victorian Brainworker
Colton Valentine
2. Fitzpiers the Empiricist: Malady and Seduction in The Woodlanders
Rachel Kravetz
3. Alice Meynell’s Brain Waves
Gregory Tate
4. Walter Pater’s Embodied Knowledge: In and Out Psychophysiology
Bénédicte Coste
5. Conversion-Crisis as a Marginal Experience in William James and Walter Pater
David Sweeney Coombs
6. Self-Taste, Embodiment, and Language in Gerard Manley Hopkins
Amanda Paxton
7. Neuron Doctrine in Fiction by Marie Corelli and Oscar Wilde
Anne Stiles
8. Vernon Lee: Empathy, Mnemic Engrams, and Satanic Aesthetics
Pamela K. Gilbert

Index

Editorial Reviews

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