Falling into Matter Problems of Embodiment in English Fiction from Defoe to Shelley

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ISBN 10: 1442641983 / ISBN 13: 9781442641983

Published by Univ of Toronto Pr, 2009

About this Item

304 pages. 9.00x6.00x1.00 inches. In Stock.

Seller Inventory # __1442641983

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Falling into Matter Problems of Embodiment in English Fiction from Defoe to Shelley
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1442641983
• ISBN 13: 9781442641983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Brand New
• Weight: 0.56 kilograms

About this title

Synopsis

Falling into Matter examines the complex role of the body in the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Elizabeth R. Napier argues that despite an increasing emphasis on the need to present ideas in corporeal terms, early fiction writers continued to register spiritual and moral reservations about the centrality of the body to human and imaginative experience.

Drawing on six works of early English fiction — Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art. Falling into Matter charts the course of the early novel as its authors engaged formally, stylistically, and thematically with the increasingly insistent role of the body in the new genre.

About the Author

Elizabeth R. Napier is a professor in the Department of English and American Literatures at Middlebury College.