De Gruyter Reflecting Senses: Perception and Appearance in Literature, Culture and the Arts

Appearances and illusion have been studied (and denounced) at least since Plato. But the impetus European culture derives from them, and in turn, the input art and literature give to their psychological study, proves their seminal and continuing power. This group of important papers concentrates on three epochs: The Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the modern period, to exhibit the complex relation between the study of appearances in science and in art. A major topic in this relation, touched upon in each of the papers, is the perceptual process by which sensory data are integrated into a mental gestalt or transformed into a verbal or visual representation. The volume brings together specialists in linguistics, the history of art, music, dance, literary history, and perceptual psychology to present this relation both in historical terms and in terms of its meaning for current aesthetic and psychological theory. The essays in this volume were produced by a collaborative research group at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, Irvine.