Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature: Unruly Images

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).