Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature
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Beschreibung
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.
Mark Kaethler is Academic Chair of Arts at Medicine Hat College in Medicine Hat, Canada. They work on research teams with the Map of Early Modern London and Linked Early Modern Drama Online at the University of Victoria, both of which have been funded by SSHRC grants. They are Book Reviews Editor for Early Theatre, and they are the author of Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama as well as a co-editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools. Their work has appeared in Shakespeare, The London Journal, Early Theatre, Literature Compass, and several other journals and edited collections.
Grant Williams is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. With William E. Engel, he has co-edited the essay collection The Shakespearean Death Arts (Palgrave, 2022), and, with Engel and Rory Loughnane, co-edited the collection Memory and Mortality in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2022). With Donald Beecher, he is co-editor of Henry Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dream and Piers Plainness: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade (CRRS, 2022). He has co-authored two critical anthologies with Engel and Loughnane: The Death Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2022) and The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2016).
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.
Provides an exclusive focus on the relationship between imagination and cognition in early modern literature Explores embodiment’s implications for internal thought and imagination Connects the broken link between image and imagination in early modern literary criticism
Autor*in
Mark Kaethler
Themen in »Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature«
Imagination Early Modern Literature Cognition Embodiment Memory Reason Faculty Psychology Drama Poetic Image Phantasm Shakespeare John Donne Spenser
Stimmen zu »Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature«
“This book on imagination in English literature of the 1500s and early 1600s is edited by professors at two institutions in Canada … . it grew out of a 2019 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America held in Toronto. In addition to the editors, 12 experts have combined their talents to write this important contribution to our knowledge of early modern English literature. ... There is much else to consider in this fascinating and most valuable book … .” (Cliff Cunningham, Sun News Austin, sunnewsaustin.com, September 1, 2025)
“This new collection of essays offers a fascinating array of entry points into a rejuvenated study of the imagination in the early modern period. The volume is fuelled by a historicist approach … . Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature does important work by returning us to an area of scholarly focus central to the study of early modern literary production while also reigniting the topic with exciting new avenues of exploration.” (John S. Garrison, Renaissance and Reformation, Vol 41 (1-2), 2025)
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This is a rich and thoughtful volume that, while being grounded in readings of faculty psychology with early modern English literature, also ranges widely across not only genres but also much of the core timeline of the period. In focusing on the pre-Cartesian nexus between the mind and body, the authors’ collective focus returns a valuable—and historically grounded—specificity and richness to our understanding of a mental faculty that at once worried and fascinated the writers of the period.
-Todd Butler, Washington State University, USA.
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