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

by Geoffrey M. Sill

This new study examines the role of the passions in the rise of the English novel. Geoffrey Sill examines medical, religious, and literary efforts to anatomize the passions, paying particular attention to the works of Dr. Alexander Monro of Edinburgh, Reverend John Lewis of Margate, and Daniel Defoe, novelist and natural historian of the passions. He shows that the figure of the "physician of the mind" is prominent not only in Defoe's novels, but also in those of Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Burney, and Edgeworth.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2001

About the author

Geoffrey Sill received his PhD. in 1974 from the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Defoe and the Idea of Fiction, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel, and articles on Walt Whitman, Daniel Defoe, and Frances Burney. He is the co-editor (with Peter Sabor and Stewart Cooke) of The Complete Plays of Frances Burney and (with Gabriel Cervantes) of an edition of Dafoe's Colonel Jack.