Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920

In the early 1860s, neurology and the study of language collided dramatically when French neurologist Paul Broca linked the third frontal convolution of the left brain hemisphere to linguistic ability. The six decades that followed witnessed unprecedented collaboration between neuroscience and the arts. While literary-minded neurologists like Silas Weir Mitchell and Santiago Ramon y Cajal wove contemporary theories of brain function into their novels, authors such as Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells used fiction to probe the philosophical ramifications of these neurological findings, some of which proved extremely controversial. By suggesting that certain parts of the brain controlled certain physical and mental functions, Victorian mental science undermined the widespread lay perception that human behaviour was controlled by free will or an immortal soul. In this volume, renowned historians and literary scholars including Mark Micale, Laura Otis and Jill Matus explain how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century fiction incorporated neurological concepts as a means of coming to grips with late-Victorian biological determinism.