Short description:

Estelle Murail is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at the Catholic University ofParis and Associate Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Paris, France. She has published several articles on the flâneur and cities, and co-edited Dickens and the Virtual City (Palgrave, 2017). Her current research focuses on urban spaces, the environment, crossings and networks, and the notion of persistence. 

Delphine Louis-Dimitrov is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Catholic University of Paris, France. Her research mostly focuses on the interplay of individuality with history and politics in fiction and autobiographical writings. Spirituality is central to her reflection on literary representations of individual and collective identities. 

Long description:

This book analyses the evolution of literary and artistic representations of the soul, exploring its development through different time periods. The volume combines literary, aesthetic, ethical, and political considerations of the soul in texts and works of art from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, spanning cultures and schools of thought. Drawing on philosophical, religious and psychological theories of the soul, it emphasizes the far-reaching and enduring epistemological function of the concept in literature, art and politics. The authors argue that the concept of the soul has shaped the understanding of human life and persistently irrigated cultural productions. They show how the concept of soul was explored and redefined by writers and artists, remaining relevant even as it became removed from its ancient or Christian origins.

Table of Contents:

I.Introduction. Rewriting the Soul: the Persistence of a Concept2.- II.Writing the Soul23.- 1.Egyptian Souls in Victorian Minds: The Transmigration of the ?Ka? in Egyptianising Fiction.- 2.E. S. Dallas?s Literary Theory: The ?Hidden Soul? and the Workings of the Imagination.- 3.?You haven?t let me call my soul my own?: Soul, psyche and the thrill of nothingness in May Sinclair?s fiction.- 4.Spectrality and Narrative Form in George Saunders?s Lincoln in the Bardo.- 5.Forging in the smithy of David Foster Wallace?s postmodern soul.- III.The Aesthetics of the Soul.- 6.Transmutations of the Soul: Anima and her Heart in Christopher Harvey?s School of the Heart (1647).- 7. Let us go Forward: The Soul, Spiritualism and the Funerary Commemoration of Richard Cosway, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Evelyn de Morgan.- 8. ?Dancing the American Soul: Secular and Sacred Motifs in the Choreographic American Renaissance.?- 9. Casting the Soul: Antony Gormley?s sculptures.- Sweet Soul Music.-IV.The Ethics and Politics of the Soul.- 11. Colliding Circles: Ralph Waldo Emerson?s Concept of the Soul Between Spiritual Self-Realization and Materialistic Expansion.- 12. ?Souls on Board?: A Counter-History of Modern Mobility.- 13. African American Women?s Literary Renaissance: A Template for Spiritual Fiction in the 21st Century?- 14. ?Persisting souls in a persisting myth: appropriation and transmigration in Ahmed Saadawi?s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013).?