Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Chapter One Cognition, consciousness and literary contexts -- Gender, literature and consciousness -- Gender, literature and society -- Addressing bodies and the trouble of gender and consciousness -- Challenging models of "woman" -- Interdisciplinary approaches to cognition and consciousness -- Questions of qualia and consciousness -- Quantum consciousness -- The gendered world according to traditional concepts -- The "problem" of consciousness: Eastern and Western approaches -- The Cosmic Web -- Literature and "superconsciousness" -- The scope and contents of Beyond Bodies -- Chapter Two Forging roads into consciousness: rasa and the influence of emotion in Wuthering Heights -- Wuthering Heights: a journey through the images of emotion -- Wuthering Heights and the uncanny -- Symbolisms and sex -- Rasa theory in drama and literature -- Rasa, qualia, and consciousness -- Rasa and Wuthering Heights -- The horror of Heathcliff -- Qualia, rasa and moral responsibility -- Chapter Three Isolating consciousness: secrets, silencing and insanity -- Jane Eyre: a journey through modes of consciousness -- Jane Eyre and higher states of consciousness: up on the roof -- Jane Eyre as "autobiography" of being and becoming -- Maya and madness -- "The Library Window" -- Paradoxes and problems: the "other" woman -- Lady Audley's Secret -- Madness as metaphor -- Madness, marriage and meaning: "The Yellow Wallpaper" -- Conclusions -- Chapter Four Beyond the veils of consciousness: individual and collective awareness in the novels of George Eliot -- George Eliot and the exploration of female consciousness -- Middlemarch: "The world is as we are" -- The pier-glass analogy -- Chhandas: the cover of reality -- Inner and outer worlds: language and consciousness.

The Lifted Veil: A metaphysical masking of consciousness -- The Victorian woman in action -- Chapter Five Shifts into quantum consciousness: Virginia Woolf's moments of being -- Twentieth century revolutions in thought -- The "New Woman" of the twentieth century -- Virginia Woolf's radical writing -- Escapes into consciousness -- The stream of consciousness -- The Waves -- Loss of consciousness: Woolf beneath the waves -- Quantum waves shed light on the stream of consciousness -- Mrs Dalloway: The entanglement of consciousness -- Gender and the quantum world: universal connectedness -- Disturbing the universe -- Chapter Six Consciousness and freedom: women's space in the twentieth-century Bildungsroman -- Patriarchy and women's space -- The Black Narcissus -- The female quest narrative: The Crying of Lot 49 -- The "Wild Zone" of consciousness -- Modern science and Vedic science shed light on Pynchon's paradox -- A journey through the Wild Zone: Housekeeping -- Consciousness and women's language -- Transience and transcendence -- Chapter Seven Beyond gender myths: Angela Carter's feminist fables -- Myths, fairy stories and gendered power games -- Angela Carter's feminist rewriting of fairy tales -- The Bloody Chamber and the myths of Eve -- The problematic enchantment of passivity -- The fantastic world of Angela Carter's novels -- Bodies as "Infernal Desire Machines" -- Challenges to the self -- Paradoxes of postmodern and Puranic tales -- Chapter Eight Transforming gender: passion, desire and consciousness -- Becoming woman -- Chris Abani's The Virgin of Flames -- Quantum gender and the creation of new myths: Jeanette Winterson -- The Passion -- Sexing the Cherry -- Gut Symmetries -- Becoming human: The Stone Gods -- AI: imprints of consciousness -- Chapter Nine Quests and questions of consciousness: Margaret Atwood's post-human futures.

Margaret Atwood and the problematic search for new worlds -- Surfacing: Society, secrets, and subjectivity -- Atwood's twenty-first century dystopia -- Consciousness and philosophies of conscience -- Chapter Ten Consciousness and conscience: the ethics of enlightenment -- Consciousness, creative writing, and the discovery of the Higgs boson -- Encountering physics and consciousness -- The universe of Self-referral creation -- Consciousness and the quantum brain -- Consciousness, emotion and ethics -- Projecting worlds from consciousness -- Literary fiction meets scientific fact -- Bibliography -- Index.