Michael R. Finn is Emeritus Professor of French in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Ryerson University in Toronto. He has written widely on the connection between literature and medicine including the books Proust, the Body and Literary Form (Cambridge, 1999) and Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits and Pornography (2009), as well as an extensive range of articles.
'Clear and precise in its arguments, Finn's book draws illuminatingly on an impressive range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources, from medical treatises and theses, medical and cultural history to writers' correspondence, biography, literary fiction, reception studies and literary criticism. Finn has produced a book that enlivens our thinking and enriches our understanding of the place of pre-Freudian unconscious during a period when developments in medicine, psychology and psychiatry in France were informing and being reflected in creative writing of various sorts.' Adam Watt, University of Exeter '... an excellent and important project ... This detailed rereading of scientific discourse is in turn enriched by literary deployments of psychic phenomena. The research is thorough. The claims made are original and insightful.' Janell Watson, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University