The second chapter places Walter Pater, the widely acknowledged founder of British aestheticism, in conversation with mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford in order to illuminate the overlapping development of aestheticism and evolutionism in the 1860s and 1870s. Around the same time that Pater made the case for “art for art’s sake,” Clifford laid out a sweeping secular humanism that reaffirmed an anthropocentric and pseudo-religious view of the cosmos. Clifford’s optimistic reinterpretation of evolutionary science, this chapter argues, reinforced and drew on Pater’s contemporary conception of the aesthetic temperament: a discriminating, tasteful personality capable of transforming, in Pater’s words, the “ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe” into the “delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the work of Mathilde Blind, who synthesized Clifford’s and Pater’s ideas in a poetic oeuvre that sought to inculcate readers into reverent ways of experiencing an otherwise atheistic world.

This chapter outlines how Christopher Brennan ushered in an experimental strand of Australian poetry through his engagement with French Symbolism, which was followed by John Shaw Nielson’s celebration of intuition and the more-than-human. It considers Nietzschean vitalism in Kenneth Slessor’s representation of urban Sydney and analyses the beauty and nihilism of his “Five Bells.” The chapter also argues that Lesbia Harford’s poetry was modernist in its radical openness about female sexuality and the female body, its minimalist representation of the working life of modern women, and lack of Romantic assumptions in her treatment of the natural world. It further considers the rhetorical force and frankness of queer desire in the work of Anna Wickham, before addressing the hoax poet Ern Malley.

In recent works on the symbolic significance of artificial beings in literature, the descriptions of humans as puppets or automata have been analyzed in singular terms, signifying people who lack autonomy in action or thought. This chapter demonstrates that in European literature of the early nineteenth century, the puppet and the automaton are used in disparate ways, the former in positive terms as a representation of a being that is in tune with natural forces and the latter in negative terms as a dead being that mindlessly follows the dictates of its programming. Through the examination of both objects in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, George Sand, and Carlo Collodi, the symbolic difference is explained through its connection to the Romantic worldview of the period, which valorized the surrender to higher forces while decrying the mechanization of humanity.

Pirandello is one of the most famous and important cultural figures of Italian modernism, and his work is deeply invested in responding to the rapidly changing forces of modernization. This chapter examines his complex relationship with modernity through a comparison to the Italian avant-garde movement of Futurism: Where the Futurists were focused on using their cultural production to usher in and intensify processes of technological modernization, Pirandello’s stance is more complex and ambivalent. The chapter thus traces their responses to a shared set of cultural conditions, spanning from a shared rejection of scientific materialism and positivism to engagement with new models of sociology, psychology, and philosophy, and finally considers their divergent views of cinema and the promise of technology to transform the future.

Poetry and medicine have long been intimately linked. William Carlos Williams noted in a worn prescription pad that the ‘use of poetry is to vivify’. Poetry has a history of being used to define life in ways that medical language sometimes cannot. This chapter traces the intersection of poetry and medicine through the figure of the physician-poet, specifically in the eighteenth century. It explores how poetry has been used to question what medical theories mean for broader philosophical questions about the human body and the self. Through poetic works by Sir Richard Blackmore, Samuel Garth, John Arbuthnot, and John Armstrong, this chapter places Williams’s note on poetry’s vivifying quality in the history of physicians using poetry to explore and define aspects of life within the human body.

Chapter three engages in the investigation of the meaning and role of natural selection, teleology and chance in evolutionary processes. From Aristotle and Aquinas, through Darwin and the twentieth-century evolutionary synthesis, to the most current philosophy of evolutionary biology, the fate of the notion of goal-directedness is traced and it is defended as indispensable and intrinsically related to chance in processes that affect the fittingness of organisms, which is tested by natural selection.

The Hippocratic treatise Diseases 4 is well known for explaining corporeal processes through vivid analogies with plants, cupping glasses, bronze vessels, swirling wine sediment, coagulating cheese, and blocked oil flasks. Scholars have often applied a heuristic dichotomy to these arguments, evaluating whether they are “mechanistic” (i.e., rely solely on recognizable physical forces) or “vitalistic” (i.e., attribute special capacities to living tissues and parts). Comparisons to implements tend to line up on the former side, while plant analogies support the latter. Rather than focus on delineating these two types of explanations, this chapter emphasizes that the author draws both sets of comparative objects from the therapies, implements, and techniques that a physician would have either administered to the body or encountered in the more general practice of medicine. Whether comparing the attractive capacity of the four inner “springs” (head, heart, gallbladder, spleen) to medicinal plants drawing up particular nutriment from the soil, or likening these same springs to bronze vessels, Diseases 4 amalgamates medical tools and the bodies that they treat. Its view of corporeality therefore emerges at the physical and conceptual interface between flesh and the therapeutic technologies that affect it, as the body absorbs and enfolds medical tools and substances.

This chapter revisits Herder’s debate with Kant in his Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, paying particular attention to Herder’s ideas on individual self-determination and his history of modern liberty and enlightenment. In this work, Herder reinterpreted human self-determination as a distinctive capacity and moral duty, whilst also viewing it as the highest form of self-preservation and sociability exhibited across the spectrum of natural beings. Kant, by contrast, invoked human ‘unsocial sociability’, presenting morality as a late development in human history as well as underlining the role of the modern state in facilitating this development. Herder rejected all the constitutive elements of Kant’s idea for a universal history, whilst also seeking to refine his account of the history of ‘state-machines’ and political government in Europe. He accordingly proposed an alternative vision of the prospects for greater peace in Europe and the world, drawing attention to a moral learning process in human history and the role of commercial cities in the rise of modern liberty. He set up the ‘Hanseatic league’ as an example for a future European union as well as predicted the empowerment of the subjugated peoples of Europe thanks to growing international trade and improved government.

George Moore spent a large portion of his career writing joyously and explicitly about sex. Sex meant everything to Moore, and he occasionally mused that it was a ‘fluid’ or ‘rhythm’ that connected and vitalized all things in the world. But at the end of his three-volume autobiography Hail and Farewell (1911–14) he not only declared the onset of age-related sexual impotence, but also claimed that it was this that was finally going to make him a great artist. His newly imposed continence was going to make him intellectually and artistically strong and would give him the authority and charisma of a prophet. He had said similar things elsewhere, and his descriptions of the dangers of excessive sexuality closely follow those of Victorian medical texts. This chapter teases out this line of thinking in Moore’s writing about art and artists, and particularly his connection of this potently continent art with Walter Pater. The chapter shows how different sexual ideas can exist side by side in the work of a single person or even a single text, and how productive continence can often be found in surprising places.

“Figuring: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Imagining and Worlding,” undertakes a case study of Cavendish’s foray into a favored intellectual strategy of modernity: to imagine a world (and therefore a politics) that follows the laws of the natural world as discovered by science. The worldview of liberalism is grounded in ideas of diversity and tolerance, the possibility of an ever-expanding, cosmopolitan world.i This is the proto-liberal view that Cavendish’s proto-conservatism, vitalism, and theory of the literary imagination finds untenable. Cavendish’s conservatism is manifested explicitly in the representations of sovereign violence that seem necessary to protect worlds and implicitly in the significance of a method of “figuration” that Cavendish theorizes—and practices—as the foundation of form in the natural world, the social world, and the literary imagination. Such figuration cannot escape the violent reality of secular nationalism inherent in the notion of “worlds.”

Margaret Cavendish was a natural philosopher and feminist who between 1653 and 1671 wrote some twenty-six works, including fourteen scientific books about atoms, matter and motion, butterflies, fleas, magnifying glasses, distant worlds, and infinity. Her vitalist–materialist view held that human beings are matter in motion who think. She argued that her age had produced many feminine writers, rulers, actors, and preachers and was perhaps a feminine reign. Cavendish was a pioneer, both as a feminist and a natural philosopher. While standing up for the rights and intellectual abilities of women, she attempted to address the most fundamental ontological and epistemological questions of philosophy. She also anticipated and articulated ideas associated with future philosophers, such as Spinoza’s pantheism, Leibniz’s vitalism, Hegel’s dialectics, and Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism. In synthesizing ideas into her own system of a vitalistic dialectical form of materialism, she paved the way both for the “new science” and the “new philosophy” that emerged during the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution.

In the seventeenth century, European thought about the capacities of a perfectly rational mind (i.e. that of the best pagan philosopher) underwent a major transformation. This transformation had three sources: (i) philological scholarship concerning the history of religion that rejected patristic narratives of pagan/Judaeo-Christian similarity; (ii) reconsiderations of Asian theology as reported by missionaries and travellers; (iii) new approaches to pagan philosophy, which was more and more conceived of as fundamentally incapable of achieving the ‘true’ metaphysical and cosmological worldview held by Christians, above all because of its universal adherence to the rational principle of ex nihilo nihil fit. As a result, by 1700 a consensus emerged that the rational pagan mind bereft of revelation would tend to some kind of animism, pantheism, vitalism, or even monism. The debate was whether this pagan worldview concealed a latent monotheism (a view held by John Selden, G.J. Vossius, Tobias Pfanner, Ralph Cudworth, and others) or to a monistic atheism (a position first articulated by Pierre Gassendi, and then further developed by Jakob Thomasius, Samuel Parker, François Bernier, and many others). By the end of the century, the second view had largely triumphed.

From the revival of the English theatres under the Restoration to the rise of a transnational Romantic theatre in the early nineteenth century, developments in dramatic literature and acting mirrored shifting medical constructions of the body, disease, and health. At the same time, they reflected a deep cultural anxiety about the feigning of illness. This chapter will consider how notions of both true and false ill-health were explored in English drama of the long eighteenth century through the medium of the performed symptom. Symptoms could disclose dramatic internal truths, or could be faked by both patients and actors – and misread by doctors and spectators – to comic effect. For most of the eighteenth century, the latter model prevailed as playwrights and actors drew upon theatre’s association with fakery to mock affected invalidism, incompetent physicians, and the frauds of fashionable society. As nerve-based conceptions of sensibility and vitalist paradigms rose to prominence, however, a new generation of playwrights and performers called upon disease’s symptoms not to spoof quackery but to represent emotional interiority. The resulting performance languages would help to give birth to the Romantic stage.

In the 1630s, two different men proposed new and potentially powerful ways of understanding the natural world. Pierre Gassendi (1592-655) and René Descartes (1596-650) each devised a system that sought to explain all natural phenomena as the result of the movement of matter. Historians now call these the mechanical philosophies of nature, and they represent an important shift in early modern ideas about the world. Gassendi revived the ancient atomism of Epicurus (341–270 BCE) while Descartes envisioned a cosmos filled with swirling vortices of tiny particles, but despite the many differences between their philosophies, both struggled to answer the same question: How can we explain God, the human soul, and life itself in a mechanical universe? This was not a small problem, as many in the seventeenth century worried that reducing all things to the movement of matter could lead to doubt, skepticism, and even outright atheism. Both Gassendi and Descartes found ingenious ways to establish proofs for the presence of God in their philosophies, and also reconciled the very essence of what it means to be human — to them, the immortal soul — with a purely material universe.

What remains in life’s wake? Postapocalyptic literature long has imagined the end as a kind of beginning; someone or something always survives Armageddon, if only for a time. This is the postapocalyptic condition of possibility, enabling the genre’s cathected tropes of loss and redemption, regression and advance. Even when the survivors are not recognizably human—are androids, aliens, or nonhuman animals—“life” goes on. Engaging with a range of American fiction and nonfiction (from Ray Bradbury to Octavia Butler to Ray Kurzweil), this essay argues that what unites the posthuman and the postapocalyptic is, first, a shared, vitalistic investment in what might be called “life after death” and, second, a refusal or inability to narrate a final, lasting extinction. In H. P. Lovecraft’s radical take on Darwinian evolution, however, we can see the prospect of a posthuman sublime that never reconstitutes the autonomous subject. The chapter concludes with a brief meditation on the implications—metaphysical, biopolitical, and critical—of this self-alienation.

While Aristotle located minerals, metals and other earth matter at the bottom of the hierarchical classification of beings, thus creating an insurmountable gap between the geological and animated ontologies, post-humanist approaches to the inorganic seek to bridge that gap and complicate the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Post-humanist approaches to the inorganic include thing-theory, object-oriented ontology, vital materialism and actor-network theory. I zoom onto Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity, which she develops in a post-humanist reading of Hegel, and which captures the capacity of organisms and objects to transform their internal parameters in response to the environment. I argue that Malabou’s ‘plasticity’ complicated and subverts the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Next, I apply these conceptual insights to ask about the place of non-human agency in collective and traumatic memory; through a close reading of Didi-Huberman’s Bark, I show that materiality and plasticity are aspects of mnemonic affordance

This chapter explores romantic-era interest in the philosophy of mind, particularly in vitalism-influenced work by contributors to the Polite Literature section of the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy: Robert Burrowes, William Preston, and Richard Stack. A medical theory that emerged in the mid-1700s, vitalism is concerned with bodily operations that are neither volitional nor recognisably mechanical – ‘involuntary motions’, as Robert Whytt termed them, such as breathing, reflexes (including ticklishness), and the pulse. Vitalism spoke to that which was outside conscious regulation, including reactions to stimuli, and so resonated with interests from the creative process and aesthetic response to public order. For the writers considered here, agency consists in the effort, supported by education and social networks, to manage an experience persistently complicated by involuntary impulses and external forces.