In the late seventeenth century, a team of scientists managed to
free, for the first time, the soft tissues of the brain and nerves
from the hard casing of the skull. In doing so, they not only
engendered modern neuroscience, and with it the promise of knowing
the mind through empirical study of the brain; they also unleashed
a host of questions, problems, paradoxes, and--strangest of
all--literary forms that are still with us today. Nervous Fictions
is the first account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar
literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science
and literature, philosophy and fiction, Jess Keiser draws attention
to a distinctive, but so far unacknowledged, mode of writing
evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts:
the nervous fiction. Apparent not just in scientific work, but also
in poetry (Barker, Blackmore, Thomson), narrative (Sterne,
Smollett, ""it-narratives""), philosophy (Hobbes, Cavendish,
Locke), satire (Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot), and medicine (Mandeville,
Boswell), nervous fictions dissect the brain through metaphor,
personification, and other figurative language. Nervous fictions
stage a central Enlightenment problematic: the clash between mind
and body, between our introspective sense of self as beings endowed
with thinking, sensing, believing, willing minds and the scientific
study of our brains as simply complex physical systems.
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