Imagination and Science in Romanticism

Imagination and Science in Romanticism PDF Author: Richard C. Sha
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421439832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

Imagination and Science in Romanticism

Imagination and Science in Romanticism PDF Author: Richard C. Sha
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421439832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

Imagination and Science in Romanticism

Imagination and Science in Romanticism PDF Author: Richard C Sha
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781421441245
Category : Discoveries in science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
How did the idea of the imagination impact Romantic literature and science?2018 Winner, Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize, The International Conference on RomanticismRichard C. Sha argues that scientific understandings of the imagination indelibly shaped literary Romanticism. Challenging the idea that the imagination found a home only on the side of the literary, as a mental vehicle for transcending the worldly materials of the sciences, Sha shows how imagination helped to operationalize both scientific and literary discovery. Essentially, the imagination forced writers to consider the difference between what was possible and impossible while thinking about how that difference could be known. Sha examines how the imagination functioned within physics and chemistry in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, neurology in Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas, physiology in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and obstetrics and embryology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He also demonstrates how the imagination was called upon to do aesthetic and scientific work using primary examples taken from the work of scientists and philosophers Davy, Dalton, Faraday, Priestley, Kant, Mary Somerville, Oersted, Marcet, Smellie, Swedenborg, Blumenbach, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Von Baer, among others. Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason-but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

The Spiritual History of Ice

The Spiritual History of Ice PDF Author: E. Wilson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403981809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.

Inventions of the Imagination

Inventions of the Imagination PDF Author: Richard T. Gray
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The dialectic between reason and imagination forms a key element in Romantic and post- Romantic philosophy, science, literature, and art. Inventions of the Imagination explores the diverse theories and assessments of this dialectic in essays by philosophers and literary and cultural critics. By the end of the eighteenth century, reason as the predominant human faculty had run its course, and imagination emerged as another force whose contributions to human intellectual existence and productivity had to be newly calculated and constantly recalibrated. The attempt to establish a universal form of reason alongside a plurality of imaginative capacities describes the ideological program of modernism from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. This collection chronicles some of the vicissitudes in the conceptualization and evaluation of the imagination across time and in various disciplines.

Perverse Romanticism

Perverse Romanticism PDF Author: Richard C. Sha
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Richard C. Sha’s revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha’s innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

The Creative Imagination

The Creative Imagination PDF Author: James Engell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780674333246
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description


Dreaming in Books

Dreaming in Books PDF Author: Andrew Piper
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226669742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well. Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book’s identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.

British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind

British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind PDF Author: Alan Richardson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139428519
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In this provocative and original study, Alan Richardson examines an entire range of intellectual, cultural, and ideological points of contact between British Romantic literary writing and the pioneering brain science of the time. Richardson breaks new ground in two fields, revealing a significant and undervalued facet of British Romanticism while demonstrating the 'Romantic' character of early neuroscience. Crucial notions like the active mind, organicism, the unconscious, the fragmented subject, instinct and intuition, arising simultaneously within the literature and psychology of the era, take on unsuspected valences that transform conventional accounts of Romantic cultural history. Neglected issues like the corporeality of mind, the role of non-linguistic communication, and the peculiarly Romantic understanding of cultural universals are reopened in discussions that bring new light to bear on long-standing critical puzzles, from Coleridge's suppression of 'Kubla Khan', to Wordsworth's perplexing theory of poetic language, to Austen's interest in head injury.

Romanticism and the Emotions

Romanticism and the Emotions PDF Author: Joel Faflak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107052394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The first essay collection to examine emotion across the span of Romantic literature and thought, in light of new scholarship.

Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination

Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination PDF Author: Laura R. Kremmel
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786838508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic’s prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.