Initially received with muted applause, Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was soon recognized as the breakthrough scientific advance that explained the evidence of the world around us, the place and history of humans, the connections between environment and evolution. Still regarded by some as radical, Darwin's contribution to world knowledge is immeasurable. This new, popular edition has been edited and abridged for the modern reader, to introduce Darwin's research in a digestible form. The FLAME TREE Foundations series features core publications which together have shaped the cultural landscape of the modern world, with cutting-edge research distilled into pocket guides designed to be both accessible and informative.

An era marked by sweeping change, the age of Queen Victoria was a time of rapid modernization as well as social and political upheaval, which is reflected in its literature. Bridging the gap between the Romantic and Modern traditions, Victorian writers held a mirror to society, chronicling the tensions between the prosperity enjoyed by a few, and the poverty and suffering endured by so many. Filled with captivating stories by the most iconic writers of the era (including Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Elizabeth Gaskell) this collection is a fitting companion to the other titles in our bestselling Gothic Fantasy series.

This book identifies the 'cognitive humanities' with new approaches to literature and culture that engage with recent theories of the embodied mind in cognitive science. If cognition should be approached less as a matter of internal representation-a Cartesian inner theatre-than as a form of embodied action, how might cultural representation be rethought? What can literature and culture reveal or challenge about embodied minds? The essays in this book ask what new directions in the humanities open up when the thinking self is understood as a participant in contexts of action, even as extended beyond the skin. Building on cognitive literary studies, but engaging much more extensively with '4E' cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) than previously, the book uses case studies from many different historical settings (such as early modern theatre and digital technologies) and in different media (narrative, art, performance) to explore the embodied mind through culture.

This open access book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, Fin de Siecle Aesthetics, American Poetics and the Postcolonial Novel, this book offers the first transhistorical study of breath in literature. At the same time, it shows how the study of breath in literature can contribute to recent developments in the Medical Humanities.

Empiricism, one of Raymond William's keywords, circulates in much contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr Johnson, it should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort to restore historical depth to the term, this book examines epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Ruskin, Alexander Bain, G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot, developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century scientific culture occurred at a time when empiricism itself was critically dismantling any such naive representationalism. Dr. Garratt argues that by the 1860s empiricism was both a dominant cultural language and a reflexive epistemic theory, producing a model of contingent self hood conceived simultaneously as the route towards knowledge and its obstacle. For this reason, Victorian empiricism predicated its search for knowledge on a profound instability, one embodied within the textual language through which it sought its articulation.By examining familiar works, such as Ruskin's Modern Painters and George Eliot's fiction, alongside the voluminous psychological and philosophical prose of Bain, Lewes, and Spencer, he illustrates, using detailed examples, how the imperatives of empiricist thought shaped the aesthetic of realism, as well as nineteenth-century views towards perception, human embodiment, and relativism. In all cases, their works give shape to empiricism's skeptical impulse. In Ruskin, for example, the narrative journey into knowledge is one of haphazard progress and fraught autobiographical engagement; in Bain's psychology it forms a story of precarious accumulation; in Lewes and Spencer, sprawling form expresses the proliferating potential of knowledge itself.

This book identifies the 'cognitive humanities' with new approaches to literature and culture that engage with recent theories of the embodied mind in cognitive science. If cognition should be approached less as a matter of internal representation-a Cartesian inner theatre-than as a form of embodied action, how might cultural representation be rethought? What can literature and culture reveal or challenge about embodied minds? The essays in this book ask what new directions in the humanities open up when the thinking self is understood as a participant in contexts of action, even as extended beyond the skin. Building on cognitive literary studies, but engaging much more extensively with '4E' cognitive science (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) than previously, the book uses case studies from many different historical settings (such as early modern theatre and digital technologies) and in different media (narrative, art, performance) to explore the embodied mind through culture.

This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of history of technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy, art and literary studies by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world.

This collection brings together verses that mark the last moments of life, the passing of one stage to another. At a time of grief, we often search for the right words to say, words which will help us come to terms with death, with loss and with the fear of what comes next. The poems and readings in this collection gather together beautiful, lyrical, insightful writings on death, grieving and healing by poets including Christina Rossetti, John Donne, Emily Dickinson and John Keats. A source of comfort, solace and fortitude.