Download or read book The Neural Sublime written by Alan Richardson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Alan Richardson is an acknowledged pioneer in cognitive approaches to literature. His command of Romantic literature, the history of ideas of the Romantic era, and contemporary cognitive research is authoritative. In The Neural Sublime, he expands on his previous groundbreaking work in cognitive historicism by applying contemporary neuroscience to Romantic-era works."---Nancy Easterlin, University of New Orleans --Book Jacket.
Download or read book The Neural Sublime written by Alan Richardson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2011 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award in Literature and Fine Arts The Neural Sublime brings recent work in cognitive neuroscience to bear on some famously vexed issues in British Romantic studies. In exciting and unprecedented ways, Alan Richardson demonstrates how developments in the neurosciences can transform the study of literary history. Richardson presents six exemplary studies, each exploring a different intersection of Romanticism and the sciences of the mind and brain: the experience of the sublime and the neuroscience of illusion; the Romantic imagination and visual imaging; the figure of apostrophe and linguistic theory; fictional representations of the mind and “theory of mind” theory; depictions of sibling incest and neo-Darwinian theories of mental behavior; and representations of female speech and cognitive developmental psychology. Richardson’s insightful analysis opens fresh perspectives on British Romanticism, pointing scholars to new developments in cognitive literary studies. He combines elements of new historicist analysis with original—and much-needed—models for understanding language, subjectivity, and social behavior. Far from signaling a departure from the prevalent critical approaches of new historicism, Richardson argues, cognitive theory presents an essential complement to them. The Neural Sublime features an array of cognitive and neuroscientific approaches, providing an engaging and readable introduction to the emergent field of cognitive literary studies.
Download or read book Tragic Cognition in Shakespeare s Othello written by Paul Cefalu and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Cefalu argues that Shakespearean characters raise timely questions about the relationship between cognition and consciousness and often defy our assumptions about “normal” cognition. The book will appeal to scholars and students interested in both the virtues and limitations of cognitive literary criticism.
Download or read book The Nervous Stage written by Matthew Wilson Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nervous Stage examines the relations between theatrical practices and the scientific study of the nervous system.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of European Romantic Literature written by Patrick Vincent and published by . This book was released on 2023-11-09 with total page 687 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining Romanticism's pan-European circulation of people, ideas, and texts, this history re-analyses the period and Britain's place in it.
Download or read book Justice Dissent and the Sublime written by Mark Canuel and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read the Romantics from the perspective of both political theory and literary studies—and consider justice through the lens of the sublime. In the past ten years, theorists from Elaine Scarry to Roger Scruton have devoted renewed attention to the aesthetic of beauty. Part of their discussions claim that beauty—because it arises from a sense of proportion, symmetry, or reciprocity—provides a model for justice. Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime makes a significant departure from this mode of thinking. Mark Canuel argues that the emphasis on beauty unwittingly reinforces, in the name of justice, the constraints of uniformity and conventionality. He calls for a more flexible and inclusive connection between aesthetics and justice, one founded on the Kantian concept of the sublime. The sublime captures the roles that asymmetry, complaint, and disagreement play in a complete understanding of a just society—a point, the author maintains, that was appreciated by a number of Romantic writers, including Mary Shelley. Canuel draws interesting connections between the debate about beauty and justice and issues in cosmopolitanism, queer theory, and animal studies.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allen Poe written by J. Gerald Kennedy and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 881 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No American author of the early 19th century enjoys a larger international audience than Edgar Allan Poe. Widely translated, read, and studied, he occupies an iconic place in global culture. Such acclaim would have gratified Poe, who deliberately wrote for "the world at large" and mocked the provincialism of strictly nationalistic themes. Partly for this reason, early literary historians cast Poe as an outsider, regarding his dark fantasies as extraneous to American life and experience. Only in the 20th century did Poe finally gain a prominent place in the national canon. Changing critical approaches have deepened our understanding of Poe's complexity and revealed an author who defies easy classification. New models of interpretation have excited fresh debates about his essential genius, his subversive imagination, his cultural insight, and his ultimate impact, urging an expansive reconsideration of his literary achievement. Edited by leading experts J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples, this volume presents a sweeping reexamination of Poe's work. Forty-five distinguished scholars address Poe's troubled life and checkered career as a "magazinist," his poetry and prose, and his reviews, essays, opinions, and marginalia. The chapters provide fresh insights into Poe's lasting impact on subsequent literature, music, art, comics, and film and illuminate his radical conception of the universe, science, and the human mind. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking, this Handbook reveals a thoroughly modern Poe, whose timeless fables of peril and loss will continue to attract new generations of readers and scholars.
Download or read book Romantic Vacancy written by Kate Singer and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the concept of a poetics of vacancy in Romantic-era literature. Romantic Vacancy argues that, at the cult of sensibility’s height, Romantic writers found alternative tropes of affect to express movement beyond sensation and the body. Grappling with sensibility’s claims that sensation could be translated into ideas and emotions, poets of vacancy rewrote core empiricist philosophies that trapped women and men in sensitive bodies and, more detrimentally, in ideological narratives about emotional response that gendered subjects’ bodies and minds. Kate Singer contends that affect’s genesis occurs instead through a series of figurative responses and movements that loop together human and nonhuman movements of mind, body, and nature into a posthuman affect. This book discovers a new form of Romantic affect that is dynamically linguistic and material. It seeks to end the long tradition of holding women and men writers of the Romantic period as separate and largely unequal. It places women writers at the forefront of speculative thinking, repositions questions of gender at the vanguard of Romantic-era thought, revises how we have long thought of gender in the period, and rewrites our notions of Romantic affect. Finally, it answers pivotal questions facing both affect studies and Romanticism about interrelations among language, affect, and materiality. Readers will learn more about the deep history of how poetic language can help us move beyond binary gender and its limiting intellectual and affective ideologies. “Romantic Vacancy is a formidable text for our time. Providing a nuanced and original account of Romanticism’s reconfiguration of affect, Singer not only opens up new ways of thinking about literature of the past; her detailed argument for complex poetic explorations of what it means to be a self, create challenges for the present, especially through the intimate relation between text and affect. This book is essential for anyone working in literary Romanticism, but will also be valuable for those interested in the complex literary history of affect.” — Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University Praise for Romantic Vacancy “For some time now there has been what we might call a movement that attends in Romantic writing to affects and states of being we had previously neglected or simply missed altogether. A generation of scholars, junior and senior, is mapping out this uncharted territory in the most original manner, along the way teaching us how to be with Romanticism, and how Romanticism has always been with us, in ways that are teaching all of us in turn how to be with the present. We can put Kate Singer’s Romantic Vacancy—smart, insightful, beautifully argued—at the vanguard of this movement, proof of the fact that any rumours of the death of our field are not only highly exaggerated but just plain wrong.” — Joel Faflak, author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery “Romantic Vacancy offers compelling close readings of Romantic women poets and two canonical male poets (Shelley and Wordsworth). After reading this book, Romantic-era scholars will no longer be able to read these poets in the same way again—I think this book will be a game changer for scholars working on women poets. This is a very fine work that should have a significant influence on the field.” — Daniela Garofalo, author of Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism
Download or read book Wounds and Words written by Christa Schönfelder and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the »wounded mind«. This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psychiatry. It then carries that dialogue forward to postmodern fiction, examining further how empirical approaches can deepen our theorizations of trauma. Within an interdisciplinary framework, this study reveals fresh insights into the poetics, politics, and ethics of trauma fiction.
Download or read book Mindful Aesthetics written by Chris Danta and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few decades, literary critics have increasingly drawn insights from cognitive neuroscience to deepen and clarify our understanding of literary representations of mind. This cognitive turn has been equally generative and contentious. While cognitive literary studies has reinforced how central the concept of mind is to aesthetic practice from the classical period to the present, critics have questioned its literalism and selective borrowing of scientific authority. Mindful Aesthetics presents both these perspectives as part of a broader consideration of the ongoing and vital importance of shifting concepts of mind to both literary and critical practice. This collection contributes to the forging of a 'new interdisciplinarity,' to paraphrase Alan Richardson's recent preface to the Neural Sublime, that is more concerned with addressing how, rather than why, we should navigate the increasingly narrow gap between the humanities and the sciences.
Download or read book Animality in British Romanticism written by Peter Heymans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how the Romantics' aesthetic views of animality interacted with their moral, scientific and religious ideas. It argues that the discourses of the sublime, beautiful and ugly helped the Romantics represent their changing relationship with the animal world and understand the increasingly precarious state of their own humanity.
Download or read book How Literature Plays with the Brain written by Paul B. Armstrong and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-09-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An original interdisciplinary study positioned at the intersection of literary theory and neuroscience. "Literature matters," says Paul B. Armstrong, "for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story." In How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the parallels between certain features of literary experience and functions of the brain. His central argument is that literature plays with the brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance which set in motion oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning. These oppositions negotiate basic tensions in the operation of the brain between the drive for pattern, synthesis, and constancy and the need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change. The challenge, Armstrong argues, is to account for the ability of readers to find incommensurable meanings in the same text, for example, or to take pleasure in art that is harmonious or dissonant, symmetrical or distorted, unified or discontinuous and disruptive. How Literature Plays with the Brain is the first book to use the resources of neuroscience and phenomenology to analyze aesthetic experience. For the neuroscientific community, the study suggests that different areas of research—the neurobiology of vision and reading, the brain-body interactions underlying emotions—may be connected to a variety of aesthetic and literary phenomena. For critics and students of literature, the study engages fundamental questions within the humanities: What is aesthetic experience? What happens when we read a literary work? How does the interpretation of literature relate to other ways of knowing?
Download or read book Romanticism s Other Minds written by John Savarese and published by . This book was released on 2023-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Romanticism's Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, John Savarese reassesses early relationships between Romantic poetry and the sciences, uncovering a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature and demonstrating earlier engagement of cognitive approaches than has heretofore been examined at length. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers framed poetry as a window into the mind's original, underlying structures of thought and feeling. While that Romantic argument helped forge a well-known relationship between poetry and introspective or private consciousness, Savarese argues that it also made poetry the staging ground for a more surprising set of debates about the naturally social mind. From James Macpherson's forgeries of ancient Scottish poetry to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, poets mined traditional literatures and recent scientific conjectures to produce alternate histories of cognition, histories that variously emphasized the impersonal, the intersubjective, and the collective. By bringing together poetics, philosophy of mind, and the physiology of embodied experience--and with major studies of James Macpherson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott--Romanticism's Other Minds recovers the interdisciplinary conversations at the heart of Romantic-era literary theory.
Download or read book British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind written by Alan Richardson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-26 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative and original study, Alan Richardson examines an entire range of intellectual, cultural, and ideological points of contact between British Romantic literary writing and the pioneering brain science of the time. Richardson breaks new ground in two fields, revealing a significant and undervalued facet of British Romanticism while demonstrating the 'Romantic' character of early neuroscience. Crucial notions like the active mind, organicism, the unconscious, the fragmented subject, instinct and intuition, arising simultaneously within the literature and psychology of the era, take on unsuspected valences that transform conventional accounts of Romantic cultural history. Neglected issues like the corporeality of mind, the role of non-linguistic communication, and the peculiarly Romantic understanding of cultural universals are reopened in discussions that bring new light to bear on long-standing critical puzzles, from Coleridge's suppression of 'Kubla Khan', to Wordsworth's perplexing theory of poetic language, to Austen's interest in head injury.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature written by Dennis Denisoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.
Download or read book English for the Sciences of the Mind and the Brain Neuroscience s Cognitive Linguistic and Social Studies written by Lucia Abbamonte and published by Maggioli Editore. This book was released on 2015 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Byron s Temperament written by Bernard Beatty and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-11 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to draw together, in eight original essays by international scholars, some of the dominant strains in critical thinking about Byron’s temperament and behaviour. Using discourses and paradigms drawn from a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, history of medicine, behaviourism and cultural studies, its contributors explore and synthesise the development of “behavioural strategies” and their impact on his poetic manner. Studies of the precise relationship of the poet’s body and mind have often placed Byron within some of our modern psychological and medical frameworks without acknowledging that these “diagnoses” are bound up with the complex business of reading and responding to literature. The topic of ‘temperament’ uniquely allows concurrent discussion of body and mind within the context of Byron’s writing, as well as his life. In this sense, the book is primarily literary. Recent scientific or quasi-scientific theory is utilised and not discounted, but the book insists upon the relevance of literary procedures and evidence, broadly understood, which are not dependent upon it and can contribute to, enlarge, or cast doubts upon some of its claims.
