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Imagination and the Arts in C.S. Lewis
Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds
Peter J. Schakel
University of Missouri Press, 2002

Imagination has long been regarded as central to C. S. Lewis's life and to his creative and critical works, but this is the first study to provide a thorough analysis of his theory of imagination, including the different ways he used the word and how those uses relate to each other. Peter Schakel begins by concentrating on the way reading or engaging with the other arts is an imaginative activity. He focuses on three books in which imagination is the central theme—Surprised by Joy, An Experiment in Criticism, and The Discarded Image—and shows the important role of imagination in Lewis's theory of education.

He then examines imagination and reading in Lewis's fiction, concentrating specifically on the Chronicles of Narnia, the most imaginative of his works. He looks at how the imaginative experience of reading the Chronicles is affected by the physical texture of the books, the illustrations, revisions of the texts, the order in which the books are read, and their narrative "voice," the "storyteller" who becomes almost a character in the stories.

Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis also explores Lewis's ideas about imagination in the nonliterary arts. Although Lewis regarded engagement with the arts as essential to a well- rounded and satisfying life, critics of his work and even biographers have given little attention to this aspect of his life. Schakel reviews the place of music, dance, art, and architecture in Lewis's life, the ways in which he uses them as content in his poems and stories, and how he develops some of the deepest, most significant themes of his stories through them.

Schakel concludes by analyzing the uses and abuses of imagination. He looks first at "moral imagination." Although Lewis did not use this term, Schakel shows how Lewis developed the concept in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man long before it became popularized in the 1980s and 1990s. While readers often concentrate on the Christian dimension of Lewis's works, equally or more important to him was their moral dimension.

Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis will appeal to students and teachers of both children's literature and twentieth-century British writers. It will also be of value to readers who wish to compare Lewis's creations with more recent imaginative works such as the Harry Potter series.

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Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages
Michelle Karnes
University of Chicago Press, 2011
In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period’s meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking her cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one. Karnes examines Bonaventure’s meditational works, the Meditationes vitae Christi, the Stimulis amoris, Piers Plowman, and Nicholas Love’s Myrrour, among others, and argues that the cognitive importance that imagination enjoyed in scholastic philosophy informed its importance in medieval meditations on the life of Christ. Emphasizing the cognitive significance of both imagination and the meditations that relied on it, she revises a long-standing association of imagination with the Middle Ages. In her account, imagination was not simply an object of suspicion but also a crucial intellectual, spiritual, and literary resource that exercised considerable authority.
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Imagining Monsters
Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England
Dennis Todd
University of Chicago Press, 1995
In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to seventeen rabbits. Deceiving respected physicians and citizens alike, she created a hoax that held England spellbound for months. In Imagining Monsters, Dennis Todd tells the story of this bizarre incident and shows how it illuminates eighteenth-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.

Mary Toft's outrageous claim was accepted because of a common belief that the imagination of a pregnant woman could deform her fetus, creating a monster within her. Drawing on largely unexamined material from medicine, embryology, philosophy, and popular "monster" exhibitions, Todd shows that such ideas about monstrous births expressed a fear central to scientific, literary, and philosophical thinking: that the imagination could transgress the barrier between mind and body.

In his analysis of the Toft case, Todd exposes deep anxieties about the threat this transgressive imagination posed to the idea of the self as stable, coherent, and autonomous. Major works of Pope and Swift reveal that they, too, were concerned with these issues, and Imagining Monsters provides detailed discussions of Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad illustrating how these writers used images of monstrosity to explore the problematic nature of human identity. It also includes a provocative analysis of Pope's later work that takes into account his physical deformity and his need to defend himself in a society that linked a deformed body with a deformed character.
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Monstrous Imagination
Marie-Hélène Huet
Harvard University Press, 1993

“What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster?” This was once the question asked when a deformed infant was born. From classical antiquity through the Enlightenment, the monstrous child bore witness to the fearsome power of the mother's imagination. What such a notion meant and how it reappeared, transformed, in the Romantic period are the questions explored in this book, a fascinating study of theories linking imagination, art, and monstrous progeny.

Down through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, philosophers and men of science rendered their learned opinions on the power of the female imagination to dominate, and thus distort, the act of procreation. Drawing on biological and physiological texts from classical times through the nineteenth century, Marie-Hélène Huet presents this argument as it evolved and as it reflected doubts about the force of paternity. She shows how, in the late eighteenth century, the discussion shifted from the scientific sphere to the aesthetic, and how the idea of imagination as monstrous progenitor eventually became a Romantic conceit. In reinterpreting art as teratology, however, Romanticism reclaimed the subversive power of imagination as a masculine attribute; it was now the artist as monstrous father who would generate new forms. From Ambroise Pare to Diderot, from Shelley to Hawthorne, Balzac and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, as Huet demonstrates, the monster and the work of art challenged preconceived ideas of the natural order of things—and disclosed, for all to see, the silent desire of their makers: to procreate without the other.

In this analysis of monstrous genesis Huet examines anew such questions as the authorship of Frankenstein, the birth of the Tussaud wax museum, and the ancient legend of the golem. Bringing together philosophy and science, aesthetics and popular culture, Monstrous Imagination is a marvel of intellectual history—a remarkable account of how the imagination has manifested itself, above all, in theory.

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Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination
Ross Labrie
University of Missouri Press, 2001

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Roman Catholic priest, a Trappist monk, a social activist, and a poet. Author of the celebrated autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton has been described as the most important American religious writer of the past hundred years. One of the notable characteristics of Merton's writing, both in poetry and in prose, was his seamless intermingling of religious and Romantic elements, an intermingling that, because of his gifts as a writer and because of his enormous influence, has had the effect of making widespread a distinctive form of religious thought and expression. In Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination, Ross Labrie reveals the breadth of Merton's intellectual reach by taking an original and systematic look at Merton's thought, which is generally regarded as eclectic and unsystematic.

What captured Merton's attention about Romanticism and mysticism and what held his attention virtually all his life was his consciousness of the ontological significance of unity and wholeness. Even though he was far from being a systematic thinker, Merton's writings form a coherent whole when considered from the point of view of his emphasis on unity and wholeness. Labrie skillfully examines Merton's letters, journals, and individual works to show the full expanse of his contribution. By using insights from the Romantic literary tradition and from the mystical tradition, the author is able to make sense of Merton's writings from all periods of his life. Although Labrie covers such sweeping topics as consciousness, self, being, nature, time, myth, culture, and individuation, remaining focused on Merton's specific, unique contributions in each area.

This thought-provoking work, which takes into account material from the recent full publication of Merton's journals and from his Columbia University notebooks on Romanticism, not only shows Merton's intellectual growth but provides a look at his expansive interests as well. Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination will make a significant contribution to Merton studies.

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Time and Imagination
Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture
Bart Keunen
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Bart Keunen’s boldly comprehensive theory of literature springs from the synthesis between narrative time and space forms called the chronotope (from the Greek chronos “time” and topos “place”). The originator of the theory, Mikhail Bakhtin, argued that each literary culture and each genre uses a family of chronotopes that endow the cultures and genres with their specific aesthetic charm, as well as their cognitive and moral strength. 

After constructing an archeology of the chronotope, Keunen proposes a remarkably original description of the various types of chronotopes. Chronotypes that emphasize conflict are using Greek mythological names to explain equilibrium, or reconciliation, and conflict chronotopes. He then develops a plot typology that covers the whole history of Western narrative culture. With examples and resonances both ancient and modern, Keunen’s Time and Imagination will equip theorists in a wide range of fields with powerful tools for years to come.
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The Written World
Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France
Jeffrey N. Peters
Northwestern University Press, 2018
In The Written World: Space, Literature, and the Chorological Imagination in Early Modern France, Jeffrey N. Peters argues that geographic space may be understood as a foundational, originating principle of literary creation. By way of an innovative reading of chora, a concept developed by Plato in the Timaeus and often construed by philosophical tradition as “space,” Peters shows that canonical literary works of the French seventeenth century are guided by what he calls a “chorological” approach to artistic invention. The chorological imagination describes the poetic as a cosmological event that gives location to—or, more accurately, in Plato’s terms, receives—the world as an object of thought.
 
In analyses of well-known authors such as Corneille, Molière, Racine, and Madame de Lafayette, Peters demonstrates that the apparent absence of physical space in seventeenth-century literary depiction indicates a subtle engagement with, rather than a rejection of, evolving principles of cosmological understanding. Space is not absent in these works so much as transformed in keeping with contemporaneous developments in early modern natural philosophy. The Written World will appeal to philosophers of literature and literary theorists as well as scholars of early modern Europe and historians of science and geography
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