This edited collection reconnects the literary imagination to the early modern cognitive environment. Under the spell of post-romantic aesthetics, modernist criticism regarded the imagination as an autonomous driver of artistic production and severed its dense ties to the image, reducing the latter to a formalistic category emptied of psychological significance. But early modern writers and thinkers did not hold such views. They understood the literary image to issue from the embodied mental faculties of the author and, through its rhetorical inscription, to influence, in turn, the interiority of the reader. For both authors and readers, then, engaging with images was not a detached aesthetic experience; it was a psycho-physiological struggle fraught with ethical peril insofar as the imagination was known for its volatility and unruliness, susceptible to the dysfunction brought on by disease and bearing, at times, in Protestant England the taint of superstition and idolatry. This volume accordingly investigates the imaginations alliances, altercations, and betrayals with rival cognitive operations based upon premodern faculty psychology.
1 Introduction: The Imagination and Image in Premodern Faculty
Psychology.- Part I The Visual Imagination.- 2 The Imagination in Distress:
Amorets Brain and the Busyrane Factor in Spensers Faerie Queene, Book 3.- 3
If all the world could have seent: Imagination and the Unseen in The
Winters Tale.- 4 The Iconoclastic Imagination: John Donnes 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 Mammons House of Trade.- 10 Seeing God
Through Spectacles: Donnes Engines of the Imagination.- 11 A Work of
Fancy: World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendishs
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 Donnes Imagined Corners.- 14 I think has
knocked his brains out: Unhealthy Imagination in The Atheists Tragedy.- 15
From the Image of Christ to the Imagining of the Sovereign: Donne, Hobbes,
and the Eclipse of Participation and Transformation.
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 Shakespeares 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 Chettles Kind-Hearts 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).
