Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia

A radical intervention into critical debates over the status of sensation within modernist literature

Offers novel and insightful readings of key modernist authors within their philosophical contexts Critiques a range of ‘neuroaesthetic’ approaches to literary criticism Proposes new ways of thinking about the relationship between philosophy, literature and technology within modernist studies.

Concentrating on the work of four major modernist authors - Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett - this book examines the close links between modernist literature and the philosophy of mind. By historicising the qualia debate and situating it within its cultural and literary contexts, it stages interventions into a range of academic debates: over the status of ‘sensations’ and ‘sense data’ within modernist fiction, over the scope and possibility of ‘neuroaesthetic’ approaches to literary criticism, and over the relationship between literature, philosophy and technology in the modernist moment.