Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature

Commonly used as a rallying cry for general approaches to literary studies, the imagination has until recently been overwritten with romantic and modernist inflections that impede our understanding of literature�s intimate involvement in early modern cognition. To recover the pre-Cartesian imagination, this collection of essays takes a historicist approach by situating literary texts within the embodied and ensouled faculty system. Image-making and fantasizing were not autonomous activities but belonged to a greater cognitive ecosystem, which the volume�s four sections reflect: �The Visual Imagination,� �Sensory and Affective Imaginings,� �Artifice and the Mnemonic Imagination,� and �Higher Imaginings.� Together they accentuate the imagination�s interdependency and friction with other faculties. Ultimately, the volume�s attention to the embodied imagination gives scholars new perspectives on literary and image production in the writings of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and their contemporaries.