Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century

Stiles, Anne

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511844461

Cited by 63 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Anne Stiles has shown that late-Victorian detective fiction frequently depicted the brain as a recordingreproduction device, with characters' 'photographic' or phonographic memories supplying crucial clues to solving mysteries. 60 At the turn of the century, the French philosopher Henri Bergson proposed that humour derived from mechanical repetition in human behaviour. Indeed, Bergson argued that humans' ludicrousness derived from their imitability: a person could only be mimicked, and so mocked, he claimed, when they resembled a predictable machine instead of a 'living personality'.…”

Section: Mimicry As Primitivism and Progressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture

Abberley

2017

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

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Section: Mimicry As Primitivism and Progressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture

Abberley

2017

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

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“…Those patterns include both the literary genre and the (neural) emotion system that largely accounts for the genre. The recognition of the importance of interweaving cognitive and historical materials has led to the development of “cognitive historicism,” one of the most prominent forms of literary study drawing on neuroscience (see, for example, Richardson and Stiles).…”

Section: The Goals Of Literary Criticism and Theory And Their Relatiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Literary Brains: Neuroscience, Criticism, and Theory

Hogan¹

2014

Literature Compass

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The "neurohumanities" are largely traditional fields of humanistic study -prominently including literature and related arts, such as film -that have taken up findings or methods of neuroscience to advance their research. Despite some (perhaps premature) media attention (see, for example, Quart), the body of work in neurohumanities is limited. It is therefore probably too early to undertake a survey of research in neuroscientific literary criticism and theory. However, there is considerable interest among literary scholars in the possibilities for such criticism and theory, and there are many areas of neuroscientific research that have begun to be incorporated into literary study or are likely to do so in the near future. The following essay first overviews some basic principles of neuroscience, selecting aspects of neuroscientific research that are particularly germane to literary study. It then considers the main tasks of literary criticism and theory and some of the ways in which neuroscience bears on those tasks. The essay ends with a brief comment on the relation between literary study that draws on neuroscience and neuroscience that takes literature as its object.In recent years, there has been growing interest in neuroscientific approaches to literary and other forms of humanistic study. To this point, concrete work in neurohumanities has been limited. Thus, Paul Armstrong chides literary researchers -including cognitive literary critics -for their lack of "serious engagement with neurobiology" (xiii). Much of the work that has been done falls into the broad category of what we might call "correlational criticism," which is often the initial phase of a new theoretical approach to literary analysis. In correlational criticism, the critic takes some theory -whether deconstruction or neuroscience -and finds parallels for its elements and principles in literature (e.g., Proust's treatment of memory might be seen as anticipating that of some neuroscientists, as in Lehrer's widely read book). Nonetheless, it seems clear that there are many promising research programs opening up in neurohumanities that go well beyond correlational criticism. These will undoubtedly develop much further in the coming years. The following essay aims to introduce some of these openings.Before going on to discuss the relations between neuroscience and the humanities, however, we need to be familiar with some basic principles of neuroscience. Thus, the first section of the following essay sets out to orient readers with respect to the anatomy and function of the human brain. Such an orientation is necessarily highly selective. I have chosen those aspects of neuroanatomy and cerebral function that bear particularly on the following discussions of literature. The second section addresses specific areas of literary study that currently are benefiting from neuroscience or that promise to do so, illustrating some of these points with examples from Shakespeare. The final section addresses the practical issue of the extent to which lit...

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“…More recently, there has been a growth in studies which consider modernist and Victorian literature in relation to neurology. Following on from the work of George Rousseau and others such as Laura Otis, Alan Richardson and Nicholas Dames, the 2007 collection Neurology and Literature , 1860‐1920 , edited by Anne Stiles, marked the start of a series of recent texts on this topic and was followed by (amongst others) Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail's edited collection Neurology and Modernity : A Cultural History of Nervous Systems , 1800–1950 () – which features an essay by Rousseau about modernism and neurology – and Stiles' monograph Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century ()…”

Section: Literature and Neurology: Historical Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… In Neurology and Literature , 1860‐1920 (), edited by Anne Stiles, Hughlings Jackson only features briefly in the introduction, neither is he a major player in Stiles' monograph Brain Science and Popular Fiction in the Late Nineteenth Century where he is mentioned a number of times but not considered in depth or at length. In Neurology and Modernity (), edited by Salisbury and Shail, there is a brief exposition of Hughlings Jackson's evolutionary account of the nervous system, specifically in relation to aphasia.…”

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confidence: 99%

Neurology and Modernist Literature

Christensen

2014

Literature Compass

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In recent years, there has been a surge in work by literary critics which considers the literature of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in relation to neurology. This builds upon an already substantial body of work which has studied the literature of this period in relation to psychology or psychoanalysis. The work of medical historians is crucial for literary critics seeking to tease out the complex relationship between psychology and neurology in this period and also in establishing that psychology must form a central aspect of historically grounded studies of neurology and literature which focus on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Focusing on neurology and psychology alongside one another in relation to modernist literature demands a new account of Freud and Freudianism. Neurology also needs to be seen as a key element of embodiment in modernist literature. The first part of the article explores these issues. The second part considers recent work by literary critics on neurology and literature and is split into two sections. The first surveys recent work which gives a historically grounded account of neurology and modernist literature, touching on work which considers authors such as Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf. The second section focuses on works which examine modernist literature in relation to the neurology and/or neuroscience of today, questioning the efficacy of such an approach. Neurology and Psychology: Learning from the History of MedicineIn this article, I focus on studies which consider the relationship between neurology (the study of the nervous system in health and disease) and literature from the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, paying particular attention to works which deal with modernism and modernist literature from the first decades of the twentieth century as this is my own area of expertise. There have been a number of studies which focus on early-twentieth-century modernist literature in relation to either psychoanalysis or psychology: Mark S. Micale's The Mind of Modernism (2004), Judith Ryan's The Vanishing Subject (1991), Lyndsey Stonebridge's The Destructive Element (1998), Kylie Valentine's Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Modernist Literature (2003), to name but a few. Perhaps ever since Lionel Trilling wrote in 1947 that '[t]he Freudian psychology is the only systematic account of the human mind which […] deserves to stand beside the chaotic mass of psychological insights which literature has accumulated through the centuries' (42-3), Freudian psychoanalysis in particular has towered above other forms of psychology as both a mode of literary interpretation and a historical context for modernism. As Micale writes, '[a]n astonishing share of the scholarship about this subject continues to take the form of influence studies of psychoanalysis in which Freud -and occasionally Jung -are presented as the sole exemplars of psychological modernism' (7). However, despite Micale's claim, made in 2004, there had already been a number o...

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Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract: Review of Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer of Boundaries, ed.

Cited by 63 publications

References 133 publications

Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture

Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture

Literary Brains: Neuroscience, Criticism, and Theory

Neurology and Modernist Literature

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