Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (review)

As suggested by its title, Katherine Kickel’s ambitious project traces the “mapping of the imagination” in “medical discourse” (primarily seventeenth century) and “eighteenth-century English fiction.” This unique juxtaposition yields consistently fresh and fascinating insights throughout, but the title’s emphasis on medicine and imagination does not convey the book’s focus on the development of the novel. Kickel argues for three “phases” of mapping the imagination that “explain how a particular set of objects—novels—and the authoring work that they describe become art objects” (7). “Authoring” constitutes the project’s key concern, and bridges Kickel’s close readings of various Enlightenment scientific and philosophical writings related to imagination’s authoring of perception and ideas with her literary analyses, which emphasize self-reflection on the creative process in form as well as theme. The project uses Elaine Scarry’s distinction between “art objects” as “made-real” (which attempt to erase their own creation) or “made-up” (which explicitly evidence their own creation) established in Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World as the framework underpinning this analysis of self-reflexive creation.

These three phases—“art objects,” “made-real,” “made-up”—structure the book. Chapter 2 on Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year shows the “liminal nature” of the early novel “as an art object” (13), exploring how the Journal illustrates the “challenges” posed to medicine and conceptualizations of voice in the emerging secularized print culture by the plague and its “paralyzing vocal effects” (13). Chapters 3 and 4 identify a second phase in which novels examined the role of authorship and of the novel itself “in light of the responsibilities and anxieties that accompanied this new genre” (67). Kickel reads Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as responding to the anxiety she locates in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, particularly Mr Partridge: “Unlike Fielding, Sterne embraces the power of the novel to sustain an afterlife separate from its author” (91) through its appeal to the reader’s sensorial subjective response. In the “final phase of mapping the imagination in English fiction” (115) discussed in chapter 5, the novel “begins to examine explicitly the role of imagining in the construction and functional operation of everyday perceptual experiences” (115) as illustrated by Ann Radcliffe’s use of the visual in The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Kickel’s reference to this “final phase” should be understood with the qualifier “pre-Romantic”; this study importantly examines imagination as a component of everyday life—linked to the novel’s representation of the mundane—instead of the quality of an extraordinary individual. And it should also be understood with Kickel’s caveat that these four examples “do not provide, singly or collectively, an exhaustive account” (14). At the same time, Kickel’s diction, tone, and organizational scheme communicate a progressiveness in her understanding of the novel (and of scientific medicine) at odds with the admirable complexity of her analyses, and which warrants further study. Kickel implies, using Scarry, that the novel and art objects in general move towards becoming “made-up”: Why? How, for example, would the positive value accorded artifice or the addresses directed at the reader during the Renaissance correlate with this movement? And how do tensions between empirical research and therapeutics complicate “the seventeenth-century movement to reformulate, challenge, and revise Galenic principles” (13)?

Novel Notions significantly contributes to the re-examination of the rise of the novel by “extend[ing] the contemporary reconsiderations of the novel’s sources even further to include its indebtedness to the medical discourse on the imagination” (13). Each chapter’s analysis of one novel begins with a particular issue from medical science. Chapter 1 starts with debate about voice related to the Reformation, print, and the “aphonia” of disabled persons or stroke victims, drawing on another of Defoe’s...