Historicizing the Embodied Imagination in Early Modern English Literature

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).

1 Introduction: The Imagination and Image in Premodern Faculty Psychology.- Part I The Visual Imagination.- 2 The Imagination in Distress: Amoret's Brain and the Busyrane Factor in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book 3.- 3 "If all the world could have seen't": Imagination and the Unseen in The Winter's Tale.- 4 The Iconoclastic Imagination: John Donne's Metaphysical Conceits.- Part II Sensory and Affective Imaginings.- 5 The Phenomenal Imagining Body in Shakespeare.- 6 Infected Fancies and Penetrative Poetics in The Rape of Lucrece.- 7 The "Imagination of Eating": The Role of the Imagination in Appetite Stimulation and Suppression.-  Part III Artifice and the Mnemonic Imagination.- 8 Confronting Imagination in Langland, Spenser, and Bacon.- 9 The Feudal Art of Memory and the Treacherous Imagination: Coveting the Golden Phantasm in Mammon's House of Trade.- 10 Seeing God Through Spectacles: Donne's "Engines" of the Imagination.- 11 "A Work of Fancy": World-Making Imagination as an Art of Memory in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World.- Part IV Higher Imaginings.- 12 Fantasy and the Imagined Music of the Spheres in Pericles.- 13 Reconciliation and Recreation at the Meeting Place for Opposites: Revisiting Donne's Imagined Corners.- 14 "I think h'as knocked his brains out": Unhealthy Imagination in The Atheist's Tragedy.- 15 From the Image of Christ to the Imagining of the Sovereign: Donne, Hobbes, and the Eclipse of Participation and Transformation.