The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel

Geoffrey Sill is Associate Professor of English and Chair of his department at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. He is the author of Defoe and the Idea of Fiction (1983) and the editor of Walt Whitman of Mickle Street (1994) and other books. He is the Defoe editor of The Scriblerian and an active member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

"Provocative and useful..." Eighteenth-Century Fiction

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: the passions and the English novel; 1. The physician and the mind from Zeno to Arbuthnot; 2. The heart, the Holy Ghost, and the ghost of Michael Servetus; 3. Alexander Monro and the anatomist's gaze; 4. Defoe and the natural history of the passions; 5. Crusoe in the cave: family passions in Robinson Crusoe; 6. The sinner, the saddler and the brewer's wife: three case studies in desire; 7. 'Surprised by his passions': the ghost of Servetus and the reverend John Lewis; 8. 'Mr Jones had somewhat about him': Henry Fielding and the moral sense; 9. Burney, Richardson, and the 'extirpation' of the passions; Epilogue: Belinda and the end of the origins; Appendix 1. Who was 'Betty'?; Appendix 2. Who was 'Sir Benjamin Hodges'?; Appendix 3. The history of the 'history of the life of Servetus', told in letters; Bibliography; Index.