Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry

An investigation into the competing impulses of science and literary experience in the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge and Keats.

Noel Jackson (Author)

9780521869379, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 March 2008

308 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.62 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Positioned between phenomenological and materialist approaches, Noel Jackson's Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry stresses Romanticism's language of embodied sensual experience and re-establishes its crucial ties to eighteenth-century empirical philosophy's effort to delineate how the mind and the emotions function … In chapters on William Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, Jackson argues that writing is a 'suggestive practice' through which chiefly political ideas may be communicated to other subjects; that Coleridgean lyric, affiliated with the analytic orientation of eighteenth-century common sense philosophy, joins self-expression and self-observation to dramatize self-consciousness as suspended between the subject speaking and the subject being observed; and that Keats's familiarity with early brain theory enables an aesthetic practice in which the sensuous and the abstract, like the mind and the nervous system, are mutually dependent … [An] impressive study.' SEL: Studies in English Literature

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 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.

Introduction: lyrical forms and empirical realities: reading Romanticism's 'language of the sense'
Part I. Senses of History: Between the Mind and the World: 1. Powers of suggestion: sensation, revolution, and Romantic aesthetics
2. The 'sense of history' and the history of the senses: periodizing perception in Wordsworth and Blake
Part II. Senses of Community: Lyric Subjectivity and 'The Culture of the Feelings'
3. Critical conditions: Coleridge, 'common sense', and the literature of self-experiment
4. Sense and consensus: Wordsworth, aesthetic culture, and the poet-physician
Part III. The Persistence of the Aesthetic: Afterlives of Romanticism: 5. John Keats and the sense of the future
6. More than a feeling? Walter Pater, Wilkie Collins, and the legacies of Wordsworthian aesthetics
Select bibliography.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], Literary studies: general [DSB]