This new study examines the role of the passions in the rise of the English novel. Geoffrey Sill examines medical, religious, and literary efforts to anatomize the passions, paying particular attention to the works of Dr Alexander Monro of Edinburgh, Reverend John Lewis of Margate, and Daniel Defoe, novelist and natural historian of the passions. He shows that the figure of the 'physician of the mind' figures prominently not only in Defoe's novels, but also in those of Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Burney, and Edgeworth.

Providing imaginatively contextualized close readings, this study focuses on three key eighteenth-century writers - Haywood, Hill and Fowke. Wilputte traces the development of the passionate language of these writers whose lives, writing careers, and interests intersected from 1720 to 1724 in the "Hillarian" coterie.

Passion's Fictions traces the intimate links between literature and the sciences of mind and soul from the age of Shakespeare to the rise of the novel. It chronicles the emergence of new sciences of the passions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and it argues that this history was shaped by rhetoric that contained the most extensively particularized discourse on the passions, offering principles for moving and affecting the passions of others in concrete social scenes. This rhetoric of the passions centered on narrative as the instrument of a non-theoretical knowledge of the passions in their particularity, predicated on an account of passion as an intimate relation between an impassioned mind and an impassioning world: rhetoric offers a kind of externalist psychology, formalized in the relation of passion to action and underwriting an account of narrative as a means of both moving passion and knowing it. This volume describes the psychology of the passions before the discipline of psychology, tracing the influence of rhetoric on theories of the passions from Francis Bacon to Adam Smith and using that history to read literary works by Shakespeare, Milton, Haywood, Richardson, and others. Narrative offers a means of knowing and moving the passions by tracing them to the events and objects that generate them; the history of narrative practices is thus a key part of the history of the psychology of the passions at a critical moment in its development.

Defoe's Writings and Manliness is a timely intervention in Defoe studies and in the study of masculinity in eighteenth-century literature more generally. Arguing that Defoe's writings insistently returned to the issues of manliness and its contrary, effeminacy, this book reveals how he drew upon a complex and diverse range of discourses through which masculinity was discussed in the period. It is for this reason that this book crosses over and moves between modern paradigms for the analysis of eighteenth-century masculinity to assess Defoe's men. A combination of Defoe's clarity of vision, a spirit of contrariness and a streak of moral didacticism resulted in an idiosyncratic and restless testing of the forces surrounding his period's ideas of manliness. Defoe's men are men, but they are never unproblematically so: they display a contrariness which indicates that a failure of manliness is never very far away.

Christopher R. Miller studies the shift in the cultural meaning of "surprise" in 18th-century England from connoting violent attack to encompassing pleasurable experience, and from external event to internal feeling.

Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.

Strange Cases is the story of the mutual influence of the case history and the British novel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fictions from Defoe's Roxana to James's The Turn of the Screw and case histories from George Cheyne's to Sigmund Freud's have found narrative impetus in pathology. The writer of a case history faces a rhetorical bind unique to the human sciences: the need to display the acumen of a scientist and the sympathy warranted to the suffering patient. Repeatedly, case historians justify their publicizing of extreme, often morbid or perverse, states of mind and body by appealing to readers to take pity on patients and to recognize the narrative as a vital social document. Diagnosis and sympathy, explicit rhetorical modes in case histories, operate implicitly in novels, shaping reader-identification. While these two narrative forms set out to fulfill an Enlightenment drive to classify and explain, they also raise social and epistemological questions that challenge some of the Enlightenment's most cherished ideals, including faith in reason, the perfectibility of humankind, and the stability of truth.