Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric

What begins with an unlikely collection of unrelated phenomena—mechanical dolls, weather, atoms, lyric poetry—blossoms in the course of Toy Medium into a subtle and persuasive meditation on one of Western philosophy's biggest puzzles: the relation of mind and matter. What is the role of the imagination in defining material substance? In a dazzling study of the poetics of materialist philosophy and of the materialism of lyric poetry, Daniel Tiffany traces the historical conjunction of matter...