The Embodied Imagination in Early Modern Literature: Unruly Images

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.

Grant Williams is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada, where he teaches early modern English literature and Shakespeare. With William E. Engel and Rory Loughnane, he has co-authored the critical anthologies The Memory Arts in Renaissance England (2016) and The Death Arts in Renaissance England (2022). With Donald Beecher, he has edited Henry Chettle’s Kind-Heart’s Dream and Piers Plainness: Two Pamphlets from the Elizabethan Book Trade (2022) and with William E. Engel, he has edited Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet among the Tombs (2022).

Mark Kaethler is Academic Chair, Arts, at Medicine Hat College, Canada, and Book Review Editor for Early Theatre. Mark is the author of Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama (2021) as well as a co-editor with Janelle Jenstad and Jennifer Roberts-Smith of Shakespeare’s Digital Language: Old Words, New Tools (2018). Their work has appeared in Shakespeare, Early Theatre, The London Journal, Literature Compass, and other publications.