Full Description
Commonly used as a rallying cry for general approaches to literary studies, the imagination has until recently been overwritten with romantic and modernist inflections that impede our understanding of literature's intimate involvement in early modern cognition. To recover the pre-Cartesian imagination, this collection of essays takes a historicist approach by situating literary texts within the embodied and ensouled faculty system. Image-making and fantasizing were not autonomous activities but belonged to a greater cognitive ecosystem, which the volume's four sections reflect: "The Visual Imagination," "Sensory and Affective Imaginings," "Artifice and the Mnemonic Imagination," and "Higher Imaginings." Together they accentuate the imagination's interdependency and friction with other faculties. Ultimately, the volume's attention to the embodied imagination gives scholars new perspectives on literary and image production in the writings of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and their contemporaries.
Contents
1 Introduction: The Imagination and Image in Premodern Faculty Psychology.- Part I The Visual Imagination.- 2 The Imagination in Distress: Amoret's Brain and the Busyrane Factor in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book 3.- 3 "If all the world could have seen't": Imagination and the Unseen in The Winter's Tale.- 4 The Iconoclastic Imagination: John Donne's Metaphysical Conceits.- Part II Sensory and Affective Imaginings.- 5 The Phenomenal Imagining Body in Shakespeare.- 6 Infected Fancies and Penetrative Poetics in The Rape of Lucrece.- 7 The "Imagination of Eating": The Role of the Imagination in Appetite Stimulation and Suppression.- Part III Artifice and the Mnemonic Imagination.- 8 Confronting Imagination in Langland, Spenser, and Bacon.- 9 The Feudal Art of Memory and the Treacherous Imagination: Coveting the Golden Phantasm in Mammon's House of Trade.- 10 Seeing God Through Spectacles: Donne's "Engines" of the Imagination.- 11 "A Work of Fancy": World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World.- Part IV Higher Imaginings.- 12 Fantasy and the Imagined Music of the Spheres in Pericles.- 13 Reconciliation and Recreation at the Meeting Place for Opposites: Revisiting Donne's Imagined Corners.- 14 "I think h'as knocked his brains out": Unhealthy Imagination in The Atheist's Tragedy.- 15 From the Image of Christ to the Imagining of the Sovereign: Donne, Hobbes, and the Eclipse of Participation and Transformation.
