Imagining the Imagination: Science and British Romanticism, 1750-1832

FAIN: FA-56408-12

Richard Chih-Tung Sha
American University (Washington, DC 20016-8200)

The imagination was without question the fundamental term for Romantic writers. This book project builds upon my previous study of the interconnections between science and sexuality in Romanticism, and is the first to situate the imagination in the contexts of the relevant sciences of the period: physiology, neurology, chemistry and physics, midwifery, and psychology. These scientific contexts were not only well-known to British Romantic poets, but also undermine the historicist claim that the imagination evaded the real. I seek to understand why, given that the imagination was relentlessly linked to disease and madness, Romantic writers such as Blake, Coleridge, Hazlitt, the Shelleys, and Wordsworth turned to it for its capacity to enable social change. William Lawrence, Percy Shelley's doctor, for instance, advised him that his heated imagination was the source of his disease.

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Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Book)
Title: Imagination and Science in Romanticism
Author: Richard C. Sha
Abstract: Richard 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. Sha 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.
Year: 2018
Publisher: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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