Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world – mechanistic materialism and vitalism – in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

Mary Helen McMurran is an associate professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario.

Mary Helen McMurran's profile page

Alison Conway (KELOWNA, BC) is Associate Dean of Research, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750.

Alison Conway's profile page

‘Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway have edited a great collection of essays on the topic of eighteenth-century science. Mind, Body, Motion, Matter offers an amazing range of topics and concerns.’

<em>Studies in English Literature</em>

‘This commendable volume will be of interest to scholars active in eighteenth-century studies as well as those whose work borders on this field.’

<em>Eighteenth Century Fiction</em>

"The stimulating articles in this volume present new approaches to some complicated concepts concerning materialism in the eighteenth century, concepts that have been considered and debated before, but not in this impressive, challenging, and, at times, provocative manner…The articles, which are of a uniformly high quality, will appeal to a broad spectrum of interests, aesthetic, literary, philosophical, French, and English."

<em>University of Toronto Quarterly</em>