“Cerebral Imaginaries” examines the intersections between anatomically justified theories of brain function and the literature of Great Britain and the United States from the 1800s to the 1880s. The years that followed the heyday of philosophical mind materialism (in the late 1700s) but preceded the dawn of modern psychology (around 1880), saw the appearance of neuroscience as a discipline. This dissertation traces the literary impact and cultural constructedness of new theories of mindedness and human cognition that came in its wake. What anatomists, alienists, and amateur scientists hypothesized about the brain in these years served to unsettle many assumptions about the thinking self that underpinned Anglo-American culture: be it the idea of having a single, coherent mind, or notions of free will and rationality. In tandem with early neurologists, contemporary writers interrogated what having (or perhaps: being) a brain really entailed, leading to a highly creative cross-insemination between science and literature. From the British Romantics to the American Gothic and from early Realism to technophile periodical fiction, this dissertation demonstrates that literature not only reacted to the science of its day, but, in turn, directly influenced it by providing structuring metaphors, cognitive frameworks, and epistemologies.
Dissertation
Cerebral imaginaries: brains and literature in the transatlantic sphere, 1800-1880
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Summer 2018
DOI: 10.17077/etd.3nsh8lgl
Abstract
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Cerebral imaginaries: brains and literature in the transatlantic sphere, 1800-1880
- Creators
- Stefan Schöberlein - University of Iowa
- Contributors
- Ed Folsom (Advisor)Garrett Stewart (Committee Member)Laura Rigal (Committee Member)John Durham Peters (Committee Member)Loren Glass (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Summer 2018
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.3nsh8lgl
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xiii, 245 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2018 Stefan Schöberlein
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 11/19/2018
- Description illustrations
- illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 220-245).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, American and British culture experienced an explosion of interest in writings about the brain. “Cerebral Imaginaries—Brains and Literature in the Transatlantic Sphere, 1800-1880” examines what scientific discoveries precipitated this trend, how literature and early cognitive science debated new insights into the brain, and what effects these debates had—both on the poetry and prose of the day, as well as on actual scientific discovery.
The years between 1800 and 1880 are generally understood to be the dawn of modern neuroscience and they circumscribe a period of time when the organ of the brain and its function came to dominate debates about the human mind and its workings. Before psychology became a scientific discipline (around 1880) and after the heyday of mental philosophy (around 1800), anatomists argued that the structure of the brain could be used to explain how the mind worked. With the mind suddenly equated to the brain, a number of questions arose for a nineteenth-century audience: Is there any difference between “me” and “my brain”? If the self is spread over distinct parts of the cranium, what happens to the mind, when the brain is damaged or destroyed? Can a material mind, adhering to natural laws, really be rational? What are the limits of free will—or can there even be free will? Is the mind fully in control of the brain—or is there a part of the brain outside of its reach?
In a time when scientists and literary writers often published in the same periodicals (aimed at general audiences), the debate over these questions was a very public one. “Cerebral Imaginaries” demonstrates, by analyzing a number of British and American texts of the time that these exchanges not only influenced how poets and novelists fictionalized the mind, but also how scientists thought and talked about their discoveries. From George Combe to Charles Dickens, from Emily Dickinson to Pliny Earle, from Benjamin Rush to Alfred Tennyson, the early to late 1800s debated what it means to have (or maybe: be) a brain—and “Cerebral Imaginaries” excavates this discourse.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9983777070502771
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