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.

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.

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.

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.

Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition

Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition PDF Author: Paul Davies
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 158420513X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Spititual quest is at the very heart of poetry, but in the materialistic climate of the late twentieth century this has been almost forgotten, even by those claiming to be experts in interpreting literature. How does the worldview common to the main esoteric traditions of East and West correspond to the aims of such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth? In Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition, Paul Davies maintains that only in the light of the spiritual teachings of these traditions can the poetry and thinking of the Romantics be understood as they intended. This is one of the first books to connect the creative nature of poetry to the core teachings of the esoteric tradition, and thereby to bring out the true meaning of several Romantic writers whose works have been trivialized by a culture that has marginalized the spiritual and tied itself to material, historical, and social issues. The author also shows that the Romantics were the first Western poets to imagine the relationship of the self to the environment as personal encounter. In this sense the Romantics were recalling a long-held secret of the esoteric "human sciences," not inventing a new one. This book brings the deepest interests of the Romantics directly into contact with issues closest to present-day students of the spiritual traditions and holistic perspectives.

The Romantic Imagination

The Romantic Imagination PDF Author: Frederick Burwick
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042000650
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description


Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era

Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era PDF Author: Tim Fulford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521829199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Examines the massive impact of colonial exploration on British scientific and literary activity between the 1760s and 1830s.