Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century by Anne Stiles (review)

In the chapter on Dracula, Stiles argues that Stoker turns to cerebral automatism to present an anxiety not around the possibility that human action could be confined to the soulless, mechanical reaction of the body to the brain, but around the inverse—that the brain could operate mechanically rather than serve as the ethical source of action. Seeing even human emotion and intellectual activity as mechanical, Allen was influenced by Thomas Huxley in his formulation of a “physiological reductionism” (89), most evident in the female sleuths of his detective fiction and their use of such things as photographic memory to find rational explanations for mysterious events. [...]while each chapter is formulated as a distinct argument, Stiles notes important connections among some of the authors (such as interests in spiritualism and antivivisection), cultural and intellectual linkages into which Stiles’s work will inspire others to conduct further research.