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How did writers understand the soul in late seventeenth-century England? This book considers depictions of the soul in literary texts that engage with Lucretius´s Epicurean philosophy in De rerum natura or through the writings of the most important natural philosopher to disseminate Epicurean atomism in England, Walter Charleton (1619-1707).

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Introduction: Great Vibrations 1. Competing Motions 2. Outrageous Motions 3. Hysterical Motions 4. Contrary Motions Conclusion: The Spirits of the Soul

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"Linker´s book is intended to be a precisely focused study, somewhere in between a long scholarly article and an academic monograph (her entire text comes to a succinct eighty-two pages). Overall, this work succeeds within these modest confines: it is a concise, lucid, and insightful account of an unduly neglected topic in early modern literary studies." (Jacqueline Broad, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 29 (3), 2017)

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Laura Linker is Assistant Professor of English at High Point University, USA.

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