Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal ChaosAssociationism and the Literary Imagination traces the influence of empirical philosophy and associationist psychology on theories of literary creativity and on the experience of reading literature. It runs from David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 to the works of major literary critics of the twentieth century, such as I.A. Richards, W.K. Wimsatt and Northrop Frye. Cairns Craig explores the ways in which associationist conceptions of literature gave rise to some of the key transformations in British writing between the romantic and modernist periods. In particular, he analyses the ways in which authors' conceptions of the form of their readers' aesthetic experience led to radical developments in literary style, from the fragmentary narrative of Sterne's Tristram Shandy in 1760 to Virginia Woolf's experiments in the rendering of characters' consciousness in the 1920s; and from Wordsworth's poetic use of autobiography to J.G. Frazer's exploration of a mythic unconscious in The Golden Bough. Detailed analyses are offered of the ways in which a wide variety of major British writers, including Scott, Lady Morgan, Dickens, Tennyson, Hardy, Yeats, Joyce and Woolf developed their literary techniques on the basis of associationist conceptions of the mind, and of how modern literary criticism - from Arthur Symons to Roland Barthes - is founded on associationist principles. Associationism and the Literary Imagination relocates the traditions of British writing since the eighteenth century within the neglected context of its native empirical philosophy, and reveals how many of the issues assumed to be products of 'postmodern' or 'deconstructive' theory have long been foregrounded and debated within the traditions of British empiricism. This is a work which provides a radical new perspective on the history of literature in Britain and Ireland and challenges many of the assumptions of contemporary theoretical debate about the |
Contents
the Romantic Imagination | 41 |
The Mythic Method and the Foundations | 181 |
Pater Joyce Woolf | 239 |
Copyright | |
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Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal Chaos Craig Cairns Craig Limited preview - 2020 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic experience Alison asso associational connections associationism associationist psychology associationist theory beauty become Cambridge University Press century chaos chaos theory character ciation Coleridge's complex conception consciousness context criticism David Copperfield David Hume Edinburgh elements Eliot emotions Faber fact feelings fiction Frazer Golden Bough Hartley Hartley's Hazlitt hereafter cited human mind Hume Hume's Humean I. A. Richards Ibid images imagination impressions individual insists James John Stuart Mill Joyce Joyce's landscape language literary literature lyrical epic Macmillan meaning memory mental Mill's modern narrative nature novel objects Ossian Oxford past Pater Philosophy pleasure poem poet poet's poetic poetry precisely present principles produce psychology reader reading recollection relation reveal Richards Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge sensation sense Stephen structure sublime suggests symbol T.S. Eliot taste thought tion Tristram Shandy Ulysses Virginia Woolf W. B. Yeats whole William words Wordsworth writing Yeats's