The brain contains multitudes. This revisionist and often surprising book rewrites that organ, fighting against forgetting. Our worries about neuropharmaceuticals and machine learning have a long pre-history. The brain as a cybernetic network of matter and metaphors, protoplasm and electricity, was born around 1800 and nineteenth-century explorations of the material mind glisten here with fresh relevance. As a literary and cultural historian, Stefan Sch"oberlein is both truffle-hunter and landscape painter. He has a knack for finding things on both sides of the Atlantic no one has read in a century to rediscover authors we never stopped reading...Writing the Brain orchestrates a scintillating call-and-response between literature and science. Farewell to the two cultures. The brain is their meeting-point.
Stefan Sch"oberlein is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. He has edited Walt Whitman's New Orleans, co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, and published literary translations into German. He has served as president of the Digital Americanists Society and is currently a contributing editor of the Walt Whitman Archive.
