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UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series
Vital Matters

Vital Matters

Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death

Edited by Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

344 Pages, 160.00 × 237.00 × 30.00 mm

Hardcover
9781442642584
Published: July 2012

£57.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Eighteenth-century questions about the properties essential to life often explored the boundary between the physical world of the body and the immaterial world of the mind and soul. Locating materialism within the larger history of ideas, Vital Matters examines how and why eighteenth-century scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists questioned nature and its animating principles.

In this volume, interdisciplinary essays by premier scholars in literary studies, art history, and the history of science and medicine analyse a wide range of subjects, including ghosts and funerary practices, dissection and digestion, automata, and monstrous births. Featuring new approaches to literary texts such as Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and paintings such as Girodet's Eternal Sleep, as well as new research on cases from the history of medicine and the history of science, Vital Matters reconsiders Enlightenment oppositions between body and mind, brain and soul, life and death, and the physical and the abstract.

Introduction
Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall

1 Living with Lucretius
Jonathan Kramnick

2 Dismantl'd Souls: The Verse Epistle, Embodied Subjectivity, and Poetic Animation
Helen Deutsch

3 Girodet and the Eternal Sleep
Kevin Chua

4 Tristram Shandy and the Art of Conception
Raymond Stephanson

5 Material Impressions: Conception, Sensibility and Inheritance
Mary Terrall

6 Misconceiving the Heir: Mind and Matter in the Warming-Pan Propaganda
Corrinne Harol

7 From the Man-Machine to the Automation-Man: The Enlightenment Origins of the Mechanistic Imagery of Humanity
Minsoo Kang

8 The ‘fair Savage’: Empiricism and Essence in Sarah Fielding's The History of Ophelia
Helen Thompson

9 Food and Feeling: ‘Digestive Force’ and the Nature of Morbidity in Vitalist Medicine
Elizabeth A. Williams

10 The divine touch, or touching divines: John Hunter, David Hume and the Bishop of Durham's rectum
Simon Chaplin

11 The Value of a Dead Body
Anita Guerrini

12 Noticing Death: Funeral Invitations and Obituaries in Early Modern Britain
Lorna Clymer

Contributors

Index

Helen Deutsch is a professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mary Terrall is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

‘This is a collection that is breathtaking in its range… Deutsch and Terrall have compiled an admirably broad range of contributions on a topic of crucial importance for eighteenth-century studies, and this is a book that deserves to be read by students of its themes and period. In the final analysis, Vital Matters matters.’ - Andrew Wells (Modern Language Review vol 109:01:2014) ‘This study would fascinate anyone with even slightest interest in either the eighteenth century or the perennial issues of life and death that it explores…A superb collection… Vital Matters is a wonderful contribution to the literature of eighteenth century thought.’ - James Stacey Taylor (The Historian vol 76:03:2014)