Schöberlein, Stefan (Author)
Folsom, Ed (Advisor)
University of Iowa
Folsom, Ed
Physical Details: 260 pp.
Language: English
“Cerebral Imaginaries” examines the intersections between anatomically justified theories of brain function and the literature of Great Britain and the United States from the 1800s to the 1880s. The years that followed the heyday of philosophical mind materialism (in the late 1700s) but preceded the dawn of modern psychology (around 1880), saw the appearance of neuroscience as a discipline. This dissertation traces the literary impact and cultural constructedness of new theories of mindedness and human cognition that came in its wake. What anatomists, alienists, and amateur scientists hypothesized about the brain in these years served to unsettle many assumptions about the thinking self that underpinned Anglo-American culture: be it the idea of having a single, coherent mind, or notions of free will and rationality. In tandem with early neurologists, contemporary writers interrogated what having (or perhaps: being) a brain really entailed, leading to a highly creative cross-insemination between science and literature. From the British Romantics to the American Gothic and from early Realism to technophile periodical fiction, this dissertation demonstrates that literature not only reacted to the science of its day, but, in turn, directly influenced it by providing structuring metaphors, cognitive frameworks, and epistemologies.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Kandel, Eric R;
(2012)
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB001201847/)
Thesis
Habinek, Lianne;
(2009)
“Such Wondrous Science”: Brain and Metaphor in Early Modern English Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001562859/)
Article
Rousseau, George;
(2007)
“Brainomania”: Brain, Mind and Soul in the Long Eighteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001032675/)
Article
Dotzler, Bernhard J.;
(2009)
“...die richtige Art wissenschaftlicher Objekte...”: Ein Epilog mit Warren McCullochs Embodiments of Mind
(/isis/citation/CBB000932094/)
Book
Charles T. Wolfe;
Céline Cherici;
Jean-Claude Dupont;
(2018)
Physique de l'esprit. Empirisme, médecine et cerveau (XVIIe-XIXe siècles)
(/isis/citation/CBB630081903/)
Chapter
Smith, Christopher Upham Murray;
(2014)
Herbert Spencer: Brain, Mind and the Hard Problem
(/isis/citation/CBB001214143/)
Article
M. Chirimuuta;
(2017)
Hughlings Jackson and the “Doctrine of Concomitance”: Mind-Brain Theorising Between Metaphysics and the Clinic
(/isis/citation/CBB608600329/)
Book
Bennett, M. R.;
Hacker, P. M. S.;
(2008)
History of Cognitive Neuroscience
(/isis/citation/CBB001250189/)
Book
Frank W. Stahnisch;
(2020)
A New Field in Mind: A History of Interdisciplinarity in the Early Brain Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB376085655/)
Article
Wassmann, Claudia;
(2014)
“Picturesque Incisiveness”: Explaining the Celebrity of James's Theory of Emotion
(/isis/citation/CBB001420015/)
Chapter
Perletti, Greta;
(2010)
“As from a Dark and Troubled Sea”. The Light of Memory in Charlotte Brontë's Mature Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001024888/)
Book
Smith, Christopher Upham Murray;
Whitaker, Harry;
(2014)
Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience
(/isis/citation/CBB001214135/)
Article
Richard Leblanc;
(2019)
The White Paper: Wilder Penfield, the Stream of Consciousness, and the Physiology of Mind
(/isis/citation/CBB650149989/)
Book
Uttal, William R.;
(2011)
Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience
(/isis/citation/CBB001214622/)
Book
S. Matthew Liao;
(2016)
Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality
(/isis/citation/CBB296087243/)
Chapter
Asaro, Peter M.;
(2008)
From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby
(/isis/citation/CBB000760385/)
Book
Stiles, Anne;
(2012)
Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001200911/)
Book
Richardson, Alan;
(2001)
British Romanticism and the science of the mind
(/isis/citation/CBB000100059/)
Article
Wayne Lazar, J.;
(2009)
Anglo-American Interest in Cerebral Physiology
(/isis/citation/CBB000953433/)
Book
Jess Keiser;
(2020)
Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience
(/isis/citation/CBB071588274/)
Be the first to comment!