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Vital Matters

Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death

Helen Deutsch editor Mary Terrall editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Toronto Press

Published:9th Jul '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Vital Matters cover

Eighteenth-century questions about the properties essential to life often explored the boundary between the physical world of the body and the immaterial world of the mind and soul. Locating materialism within the larger history of ideas, Vital Matters examines how and why eighteenth-century scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists questioned nature and its animating principles.

In this volume, interdisciplinary essays by premier scholars in literary studies, art history, and the history of science and medicine analyse a wide range of subjects, including ghosts and funerary practices, dissection and digestion, automata, and monstrous births. Featuring new approaches to literary texts such as Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and paintings such as Girodet's Eternal Sleep, as well as new research on cases from the history of medicine and the history of science, Vital Matters reconsiders Enlightenment oppositions between body and mind, brain and soul, life and death, and the physical and the abstract.

‘This is a collection that is breathtaking in its range… Deutsch and Terrall have compiled an admirably broad range of contributions on a topic of crucial importance for eighteenth-century studies, and this is a book that deserves to be read by students of its themes and period. In the final analysis, Vital Matters matters.’ -- Andrew Wells * Modern Language Review vol 109:01:2014 *
‘This study would fascinate anyone with even slightest interest in either the eighteenth century or the perennial issues of life and death that it explores…A superb collection… Vital Matters is a wonderful contribution to the literature of eighteenth century thought.’ -- James Stacey Taylor * The Historian vol 76:03:2014 *

ISBN: 9781442642584

Dimensions: 237mm x 160mm x 30mm

Weight: 660g

344 pages