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

Napier, Elizabeth R.

ISBN 10: 1442641983 / ISBN 13: 9781442641983

Published by University of Toronto Press, Buffalo, NY, 2012

About this Item

Book and dust jacket are gently used with only minor wear. Tightly bound copy with clean interior having no markings, writing, underlining, or highlighting in margins or text block. Inv. # 10246.

Seller Inventory # 010246

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Falling into Matter: Problems of Embodiment in English Fiction from Defoe to Shelley
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Buffalo, NY
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1442641983
• ISBN 13: 9781442641983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

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.