This book examines Thomas De Quincey's notion of the unconscious in the light of modern cognitive science and nineteenth-century science. It challenges Freudian theories as the default methodology in order to understand De Quincey's oeuvre and the unconscious in literature more generally.

This book examines Thomas De Quincey's notion of the unconscious in the light of modern cognitive science and nineteenth-century science. It challenges Freudian theories as the default methodology in order to understand De Quincey's oeuvre and the unconscious in literature more generally.

This book reassesses the philosophical, psychological and, above all, the literary representations of the unconscious in the early twentieth century. This period is distinctive in the history of responses to the unconscious because it gave rise to a line of thought according to which the unconscious is an intelligent agent able to perform judgements and formulate its own thoughts. The roots of this theory stretch back to nineteenth-century British physiologists. Despite the production of a number of studies on modernist theories of the relation of the unconscious to conscious cognition, the degree to which the notion of the intelligent unconscious influenced modernist thinkers and writers remains understudied. This study seeks to look back at modernism from beyond the Freudian model. It is striking that although we tend not to explore the importance of this way of thinking about the unconscious and its relationship to consciousness during this period, modernist writers adopted it widely. The intelligent unconscious was particularly appealing to literary authors as it is intertwined with creativity and artistic novelty through its ability to move beyond discursive logic. The book concentrates primarily on the works of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, authors who engaged the notion of the intelligent unconscious, reworked it and offered it for the consumption of the general populace in varied ways and for different purposes, whether aesthetic, philosophical, societal or ideological.

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.

Wordsworth has traditionally been understood as the 'poet of memory'. This book argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions. As well as providing new interpretations of major and under-studied writing by Wordsworth, this volume challenges a long tradition of psychoanalytic reading of romanticism, which uses trauma to explain the limits of literary memory. The book contests key psychoanalytic concepts in literary criticism including repression, sublimation, mourning, and pleasure. It asks what it would mean for us to be 'surprised by joy'.

History is littered with evidence of humanity's fascination with drugs and the pursuit of altered states. From early Romanticism to late-nineteenth-century occultism and from fin de siècle Paris to contemporary psychedelic shamanism, psychoactive substances have playedcatalyzing people. Yet serious analysis of the religious dimensions of modern drug use is still lacking. the use of drugs and the pursuit of transcendence from the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with the Romantic fascination with opium, it chronicles the discovery of anesthetics, the psychiatric and religious interest in hashish, the bewitching power of mescaline and hallucinogenic fungi, the more recent uses of LSD, as well as the debates surrounding drugs and religious experience. This fascinating and wide-ranging sociological and cultural history fills a major gap in the study of religion in the modern world and our understanding of the importance of countercultural thought, offering new and timely insights into the controversial relationship between drugs and mystical experience.

This collection of essays examines the way psychoactive substances are described and discussed within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural texts. Covering several genres, such as novels, poetry, autobiography and non-fiction, individual essays provide insights on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of drug effects of opium, alcohol and many other plant-based substances. Contributors consider both contemporary and recent medical knowledge in order to contextualise and illuminate understandings of how drugs were utilised as stimulants, as relaxants, for pleasure, as pain relievers and for other purposes. Chapters also examine the novelty of experimentations of drugs in conversation with the way literary texts incorporate them, highlighting the importance of literary and cultural texts for addressing ethical questions.