Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 73)

Romantic poets, notably Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, and Keats, were deeply interested in how perception and sensory experience operate, and in the connections between sense-perception and aesthetic experience. Noel Jackson tracks this preoccupation through the Romantic period and beyond, both in relation to late eighteenth-century human sciences, and in the context of momentous social transformations in the period of the French Revolution. Combining close readings of the poems with interdisciplinary research into the history of the human sciences, Noel Jackson sheds new light on Romantic efforts to define how art is experienced in relation to the newly emerging sciences of the mind and shows the continued relevance of these ideas to our own habits of cultural and historical criticism today. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Romanticism, but also to those interested in the intellectual interrelations between literature and science. Cover 1 Half-title 3 Series-title 4 Title 5 Copyright 6 Dedication 7 Contents 9 Illustrations 11 Acknowledgments 13 Abbreviations 15 Introduction: Lyrical forms and empirical realities: reading Romanticism’s “language of the sense” 17 Part I Senses of history: between the mind and the world 37 Chapter 1 Powers of suggestion: sensation, revolution, and Romantic aesthetics 39 Suggestiveness and romantic criticism 44 The poetics of suggestion 49 The writer as physician of state 60 Sentences, sentience, sentiment: thelwall's media 65 "Uncommunicated lightning": sensation, autonomy, and aesthetic form 74 Chapter 2 The "sense of history" and the history of the senses: periodizing perception in Wordsworth and Blake 39 Histories of perception, past and present 84 Sensation, self, and world: Wordsworth's "infant babe" 88 Perception, repetition, periodization: conjectural physiology and the historiography of feeling 91 Varieties of historical experience 96 "Sensations of the imagination": history and double-consciousness 100 Pulses, periods, and the poet's work: the case of blake 107 Part II Senses of community: lyric subjectivity and "the culture of the feelings" 117 Chapter 3 Critical conditions: Coleridge, "common sense," and the literature of self-experiment 119 Autonomy, embodiment, experiment 123 Techniques of the self-observer 127 Thomas reid and the sensus communis 129 Maps of misreading 131 Solipsism and sociality 138 Norm and form: the case of meter 141 Conclusion: the experimentum crucis 144 Chapter 4 Sense and consensus: Wordsworth, aesthetic culture, and the poet-physician 148 The conflict of the faculties 153 Nerves and heart 156 Fictions of consentaneity 161 Aesthetic culture and the occultation of "sense" 166 Part III The persistence of the aesthetic: afterlives of Romanticism 179 Chapter 5 John Keats and the sense of the future 181 Posterity and the double-life of the poet 186 The physiology of disinterest 192 The feel of not to feel it 198 Abstraction and aesthetic value 204 Conclusion: the imminence of the aesthetic 207 Chapter 6 More than a feeling? Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, and the legacies of Wordsworthian aesthetics 213 Wordsworth, aisthesis, and aesthetic value 218 Pater's Wordsworth and the problem of feeling 222 The pulsation philosophy 226 Conclusion 235 Notes 237 Introduction: lyrical forms and empirical realities 237 Powers of suggestion 243 The "sense of history" and the history of the senses 252 Critical conditions 260 Sense and consensus 268 John Keats and the sense of the future 274 More than a feeling? 280 Select bibliography 287 Manuscripts 287 King's College London 287 Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh 287 Royal College of Surgeons of England 287 The Royal Institution of Great Britain 287 University of Glasgow Library 288 Books 288 Index 300 An investigation into the competing impulses of science and literary experience in the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge and Keats