| This dissertation examines the history of the concept of the imagination in a number of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century normative discourses: specifically, theology, physiology, psychology, medicine, philosophy and aesthetic and literary theory. The central focus is upon the ways in which the concept of the imagination is tainted by association with materialism and madness, and the ways that the concept of the material imagination shapes and limits eighteenth-century poetry. A primary hypothesis, for which evidence is adduced, is that the imagination is predominantly conceived of as an essentially mechanical faculty in most of these discourses.;The first two chapters consider the incorporation of the theological concept of the sinful imagination into seventeenth-century medicine. The third examines the centrality of the material imagination to the satiric psychopathologies invoked in the debates over atheism and enthusiasm. The last two chapters, four and five, address the concept of the material imagination in aesthetic theory and in satire, with the focus upon the works of Swift and Pope, which are contrasted with the works of earlier poets, especially Spenser and Milton. |
