Literary Neurophysiology - Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.s. Writing, 1860-1914

The book investigates the relations between American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the sciences of the brain and the nervous system, showing how literary authors investigated, used, and challenged this emerging neurophysiology.

List of contents

• Introduction: Literature Confronts Physiological Psychology, 1860 to 1911


• 1: American Literary Realism and Nervous "Reflexion"


• 2: Memory, Materiality, Mental Telegraphy


• 3: Vitality, Racial Creativity, and Biopolitics


• 4: Nervous Shock, Sexual Inversion, and National Virility


• 5: Psychophysics to Literary Experiments: Gertrude Stein and Neural Composition


• 6: Reflex Redux-Will, Attention, Habit, Indeterminacy

About the author

Randall Knoper teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is chair of the Department of English. He is the author of Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance .

Summary

The book investigates the relations between American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the sciences of the brain and the nervous system, showing how literary authors investigated, used, and challenged this emerging neurophysiology.

Product details

• Authors: Randall Knoper, Randall (Associate Professor of English an Knoper, Knoper Randall
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2022
• EAN: 9780192845504
• ISBN: 978-0-19-284550-4
• No. of pages: 306
• Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; USA, English, HISTORY / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies), LITERARY CRITICISM / General, MEDICAL / History, History of Medicine, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers