.... At the heart of this account is the postulation by physiologists and psychologists of the mental reflex, a rather curious hybrid. As Wientzen explains it, this view holds that mental operations depend on the body so that what happens in consciousness may be as automatic and unwilled as the reflexes of the body...

...Linda M. Shires Contemporary literary scholars such as Keen have paid close attention to nineteenth-century mental science and pre-Freudian psychology. I say “again” a hot topic because such analyses started a century and a quarter ago. James Sully, the psychologist, analyzed George Eliot's...

...Lisa Zunshine My essay emphasizes the social aspect of our engagement with fictional narratives by drawing on cognitive scientists' research into “theory of mind,” also known as “mind reading”: our evolved adaptation for explaining people's behavior in terms of their mental states, such as thoughts...

... this constitution of character through collectivity, it disrupts both the interiorized mental procedures of Millian liberalism and our own critical practice of reading characters as metaphysically more than the cultural information of which they are composed. By unleashing statistical sciences into the dimension...

...Hannah Walser Abstract Whether identified as “genies,” “little men,” or simply “les moi,” a vast horde of personified mental faculties populates In Search of Lost Time , responsible for behaviors too instantaneous or too ingrained to come under conscious control. Representing automatic neural...

...Joshua Gang What would modernist fiction look like if it were mindless and had no access to mental states? While modernism is often understood as a psychological turn inward, this article shows how introspective psychology competed against other psychological discourses—and how writers...

... is the best way for individuals to participate in a community without becoming rigidly committed to oppressive everyday social roles. Mill's initial disparagement of fiction as “a series of states of mere outward circumstances” belies his eventual conviction that the mental representation of others...

... it as both disabling and enabling and deploys it as a claim to modernity and a rejection of and retreat from the modern world. The essay argues that the novel is prescient in its postmodern playfulness, offering a representation of mental illness detached from its specifically psychiatric or broadly medical...

...Scott Selisker This article describes how the novelist David Mitchell employs the “ topos of the cult,” a set of conventions that describe a mental state of unfreedom, in the novels Ghostwritten (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004). This figuration of an unfree form of society—characterized by a group's...

...Matthew Sussman For many readers, “stupidity” in Henry James signifies mental slowness, poor taste, or even moral delinquency. However, James also conceived of stupidity as a positive virtue because it promises to deliver the individual from the “ordeal of consciousness” associated...

.... Each chapter focuses on the particular difficulties of conceptualizing mental labor and, as a whole, the book uses a chronological schema to outline the shifts that take place in this conceptualiza- tion hmBronte's The Professor ('1847) to Dickens's David Copperfield (1847-50...

... experimentalism. What is equally valuable in Gaedtke's approach is his intertextual treatment of contemporary memoirs of mental illness, such as Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) and Marguerite Sechehaye's transcription of an anonymous young woman's psychic dysfunction...

.... Acting involuntarily and inexplicably, Newman’s decision originates in an unconscious mental process, just as James, in recollecting the imaginative germ of New- man’s transformative experience in The American, recalls his own creative process. It was, Ryan notes, “non-volitional, unconscious...

... and ideas of mental causa- tion were understood to be themselves external forces in the British philosophy, poetry, and prose fictions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kramnick, in elegant, well-researched, imaginative, and forceful prose, argues not just that dualist accounts of mind...

... lending out one's mind to another: in reading, he writes, “I am thinking the thoughts of another. . . . I think [those thoughts] as my very own” ( Poulet 55–56 ). For D. A. Miller, by contrast, it feels like a confirmation of our identities as liberal subjects—that is, subjects “whose private life, mental...

... and judgment” (51), an ethics based on the need to project constantly, to anticipate the unanticipated, to actively worry the future and the past. Similarly, Yahav finds in Edmund Burke and Adam Smith what she calls a “model of durational aesthetics” (133): an account of sensation and mental activity...

... a Dreyfusard.” The narrator then appeals to one of two “laws of language” to explain the duke's use of the inappropriate phrase “with a name like” (“quand on s'appelle”). One of them “demands that we should express ourselves like others in our mental category and not of our caste”; the duke is speaking like...

... 204). Carlyle had written of how she "could fancy in reading it, to be seeing and hearing once again a crystal-clear, musical, Scotch stream, such as I long to lie down beside" (Haight, Letters 17). It seems surprising that Carlyle reports having a mental picture which is nowhere present...

... that responsibility and attach further consequences to it. In moral terms, these are questions of blame. Harm’s Way pictures a world in which blame couples with accident and has nothing necessar- ily to do with agency, mental state, or intent—all sacred signatures of Western autonomy, subjectivity...

... of the conclusion, then, mental pathologies must either be revealed as false solutions (as in the case of Christie, whose killers are invariably in their right minds) or, ultimately, be subjected to the same field of cause-and-effect that governs the usual modes of detection. In the latter instance, madness is thus...