Nervous Reactions considers Victorian responses to Romanticism, particularly the way in which the Romantic period was frequently constructed in Victorian-era texts as a time of nervous or excitable authors (and readers) at odds with Victorian values of self-restraint, moderation, and stolidity. Represented in various ways—as a threat to social order, as a desirable freedom of feeling, as a pathological weakness that must be cured—this nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an important though as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. By attending to this nervousness, the essays in this volume offer a new consideration not only of the relationship between the Victorian and Romantic periods, but also of the ways in which our own responses to Romanticism have been mediated by this Victorian attention to Romantic excitability. Considering editions and biographies as well as literary and critical responses to Romantic writers, the volume addresses a variety of discursive modes and genres, and brings to light a number of authors not normally included in the longstanding category of "Victorian Romanticism": on the Romantic side, not just Wordsworth, Keats, and P. B. Shelley but also Byron, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and on the Victorian side, not just Thomas Carlyle and the Brownings but also Sara Coleridge, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Archibald Lampman, and J. S. Mill. Contributors include D. M. R. Bentley, Kristen Guest, Joel Faflak, Grace Kehler, Donelle Ruwe, Alan Vardy, Lisa Vargo, Timothy J. Wandling, Joanne Wilkes, and Julia M. Wright.

A synthesis of classic and modern neurobehavioral literature dealing with the principles by which complex, purposive, and intelligent behavior is generated, this book features: * papers by C.S. Sherrington, E. von Holst, D.M. Wilson, G. Fraenkel, H. Mittelstaedt, and P. Weiss * clear descriptions of three types of elementary units of behavior -- the reflex, the oscillator, and the servomechanism * a review of the diverse manifestations of hierarchical structure in the neural mechanisms underlying coordinated action. This volume has proven to be of great value to psychologists, neurobiologists, and philosophers interested in the problem of action and how it may be approached in light of modern neurobehavioral research. It has been designed for use as a supplemental text in courses in physiological psychology, neurobiology and behavior, and those courses in cognitive and developmental psychology that place particular emphasis on understanding how complex behavior patterns are implemented.

Brain Mechanisms