Nervous Acts Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility [Paperback]

These essays demonstrate the sweeping influence of the human nervous system on the rise of literature and sensibility in early modern Europe. The brain and nerves have usually been treated as narrow topics within the history of science and medicine. Now George Rousseau, an international authority on the relations of literature and medicine, demonstrates why a broader context is necessary. The nervous system was a crucial factor in the rise of recent civilization. More than any other body part, it holds the key to understanding how far back the strains and stresses of modern life - fatigue, depression, mental illness - extend.Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: 'ORIGINATED NEUROLOGY': NERVES, SPIRITS, AND FIBRES, 1969-2004 Nerves and Neurons in Human Evolution Nerves and Selves in the Ancient World Early Modern Nerves 'Fire in the Soul': The Animal Spirits Gendered Bodies and 'Nerve Doctors' Passions, Emotions, Affections: Writing out the Nervous Sentiments The Nervous Style Nerves and Music: The Aesthetic Debates, 1740-1890 Nerves and 'Modern Life' 'Literary Nerves' and Evolutionary Biology Coda: Discursivity and the Pharmacological Future PART II: ESSAYS, 1969-1993 Science and the Discovery of the Imagination (1969) Pineapples, Pregnancy, and Pica: Nerves and the 'Mother's Imagination' (1972) Nerves and Racism: Le Cat's Neurology of Racism (1973) Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Toward the Origins of Sensibility (1975) Nerves and Nymphomania: Bienville and Female Sensibility (1982) Discourses of the Nerve (1989) Towards a Semiotics of the Nerve (1991) 'Strange Pathology:' Nerves and the Hysteria Diagnosis in Early Modern Europe (1993) PART III: EPILOGUE Epilogue 2004 Bibliography Index

'[George Sebastian Rousseau] is one of our most influential critics of Eighteenth-century British literature and literary culture. Moreover, he was one of the first to develop a genealogy of knowledge which encompassed Eighteenth-century physiology, poetics, criticism, and literls2