ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines some of the reverberations of the “discovery” of an imagination “organ” at the end of the seventeenth century. It explores the challenge that illness posed to one narrator's use of language and, conversely, his imagination at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The book examines how midcentury novelists responded to medical conversations about the imagination through their use of narrators who reflect on their own acts of authorial creation. It looks at the manner in which the imagination actually inspires a perceptual experience in the natural world through its construction of a mind-dependent perceptual reality.
