Mind and Embodiment in Late Victorian Literature

Shows how late-Victorian writers develop new understandings of the relationship between cognition and embodiment.

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.