ABSTRACT
Cognitive literary studies welcome an array of methods and approaches and have proven especially amenable to developing ideas in the cognitive sciences of the embodied mind. Traditional historicism typically applies contemporary discourses of early mind-sciences but I propose, however, that for George Eliot's Romola, historical context and Victorian science partially obscure a literally physiological, in fact, anatomical, vector of thinking in the novel. I take up recent developments in artificial intelligence and proprioception to suggest that Eliot's details of postural consciousness contribute to her overall psychological realism and, furthermore, that thinking enters her novels anatomically through “thinking bodies”—especially through Romola herself.
