Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia

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.