Nervous Fictions

Nervous Fictions
Author: Jess Keiser
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2020-09-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813944791


Download Nervous Fictions Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

"The brain contains ten thousand cells," wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1718, "in each some active fancy dwells." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as scientists began to better understand the workings of the nerves, the nervous system became the site for a series of elaborate fantasies. The pineal gland is transformed into a throne for the sovereign soul. Animal spirits march the nerves like parading soldiers. An internal archivist searches through cerebral impressions to locate certain memories. An anatomist discovers that the brain of a fashionable man is stuffed full of beautiful clothes and billet-doux. A hypochondriac worries that his own brain will be disassembled like a watch. A sentimentalist sees the entire world as a giant nervous system comprising sympathetic spectators. Nervous Fictions is the first account of the Enlightenment origins of neuroscience and the "active fancies" it generated. By surveying the work of scientists (Willis, Newton, Cheyne), philosophers (Descartes, Cavendish, Locke), satirists (Swift, Pope), and novelists (Haywood, Fielding, Sterne), Keiser shows how attempts to understand the brain’s relationship to the mind produced in turn new literary forms. Early brain anatomists turned to tropes to explicate psyche and cerebrum, just as poets and novelists found themselves exploring new kinds of mental and physical interiority. In this respect, literary language became a tool to aid scientific investigation, while science spurred literary invention.


Nervous Fictions
Language: en
Pages: 425
Authors: Jess Keiser
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-09-21 - Publisher: University of Virginia Press

GET EBOOK

"The brain contains ten thousand cells," wrote the poet Matthew Prior in 1718, "in each some active fancy dwells." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Nervous System
Language: en
Pages: 225
Authors: Lina Meruane
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-05-18 - Publisher: Graywolf Press

GET EBOOK

An electrifying novel about illness, displacement, and what holds us together, by the author of Seeing Red Ella is an astrophysicist struggling with her doctora
Nervous Dancer
Language: en
Pages: 183
Authors: Carol Lee Lorenzo
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011 - Publisher: University of Georgia Press

GET EBOOK

"Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction."
Our Nervous Friends
Language: en
Pages: 280
Authors: Robert Sproul Carroll
Categories: Psychology
Type: BOOK - Published: 1919 - Publisher: Books Explorer

GET EBOOK

The publication date likely mirrors the medical and emotional views of the early twentieth century, when mental health wasn't as developed as it is these days.
The Nervous Wreck
Language: en
Pages: 354
Authors: E. J. Rath
Categories: Nervous wreck (Motion picture : 1926)
Type: BOOK - Published: 1923 - Publisher:

GET EBOOK