Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics(The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)

An account of the overlapping development of medicine and aesthetics during the Enlightenment and Romantic eras that develops a critical method attentive to aesthetics and poetics as sites for historical thinking This book studies later eighteenth-century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly concerned about the relationship between the geographical movements of persons displaced from home and the physiological or nervous “motions” within their bodies and minds. Looking beyond familiar narratives about medicine and art’s shared therapeutic and harmonizing ideals, this book explores Enlightenment and Romantic-era aesthetics and poetics in relation to a central but less well known area of eighteenth-century environmental medicine: pathology. No mere system of diagnosis or classification, philosophical pathology was an art of interpretation, offering sophisticated ways of reading the multiple conditions and causes of disease, however absent from perception, in their palpable, embodied effects. For medical, anthropological, environmental, and literary authors alike, it helped to locate the dislocations of modern mobility when a full view of their causes and conditions remained imperfectly understood or still unfolding. Goodman traces the surprising afterlife of the period’s exemplary but unexplained pathology of motion, medical nostalgia, within aesthetic theory and poetics, arguing that nostalgia persisted there not as a named condition but as a set of formal principles and practices, perturbing claims about the harmony, freedom, and free play of the mind.

About the Author :
Kevis Goodman is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to published essays and edited collections, she is the author of Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History.

Review :
“Excellent . . . a tour-de-force.”—Arden Hegele, British Association for Romanticism Studies Review Winner of the 2022 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, sponsored by the International Conference on Romanticism Shortlisted for the Marilyn Gaull Award from The Wordsworth Circle Honorable Mention from the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, sponsored by The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, sponsored by The Indiana U Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies “In tracing how eighteenth-century pathology and aesthetics registered causal forces beyond our immediate ken, Kevis Goodman offers an electrifying account of the way poetics made abstract historical processes visible at a pivotal moment in global modernity.”—Lynn Festa, author of Fiction Without Humanity “Goodman provides a new way of thinking about human freedom, the imagination, volition, and mobility. This is a richly erudite and theoretically lucid book that anyone working in this period will want to read and reread.”—Alan Bewell, University of Toronto “By bringing together aesthetics and medicine, Goodman offers a new and enthralling description of modernity. Pathologies of Motion also brilliantly vindicates, as it demonstrates, the practice of symptomatic reading.”—Deidre Lynch, Harvard University “Goodman’s elegant, learned work is the entering wedge in a radical rethinking of Romanticism and its predecessors. It reveals a pathological counter-current in tension with the age’s dominant aesthetic quest for harmony.”—Marjorie Levinson, author of Thinking through Poetry   “Goodman rediscovers eighteenth-century pathology as a synoptic discipline projecting the material body and the imagination as mutually involved and evolving agents of human behavior and consciousness. Her book thereby offers exciting new readings of reading itself—of the physiological functions of organized sound—as well as of Schiller and the Scottish doctors, of the newly privileged phenomenon of nostalgia, and of some of the best-known Romantic poems.”—David Simpson, author of Engaging Violence