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Thesis ID: CBB001560649

The Embodied Imagination: British Romantic Cognitive Science (2013)

University of Alberta (Canada)
Miall, David

Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Advisor: Miall, David
Physical Details: 379 pp.
Language: English

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Sublime (philosophy) Science and literature Cognitive science 18th century 19th century Great Britain Wordsworth, William Priestley, Joseph Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Hartley, David

This dissertation examines the intersection of British Romantic literary and scientific cognitive theory from 1749 to 1818. Asserting that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge participated in cognitive science debates initiated by Joseph Priestley's popularization of David Hartley's physiological theory of sentience, it argues that the dual lenses of British empiricism and twenty-first-century cognitive science best explicate the poets' theories of imagination. The poets' philosophical positions are often understood as a progression from youthful fascination with empiricism to mature transcendentalism. Examining their work in relationship to the cognitive hypotheses of contemporary scientists--Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, and Tom Wedgwood--this study demonstrates that their theories reconcile materialist and transcendentalist epistemologies. I use a cognitive historicist methodology to examine categories of experience that New Historicist critics have considered in terms of transcendentalism. I argue that both poets and scientists saw transcendental experiences, such as encounters with the sublime, in terms of embodied emotion. Enaction, a twenty-first century cognitive theory, exhibits similar fundamental premises as Romantic hypotheses about the relationship between mind, matter, human beings, and the natural world and the importance of emotion in cognition. This thesis examines parallels between contemporary and Romantic-era cognitive science discourse, helps resolve certain longstanding cruxes in the scholarship on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and brings to light overlooked scientific figures in Romantic culture whose intellectual contributions are important to Romantic literary theory.

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Description “Examines the intersection of British Romantic literary and scientific cognitive theory from 1749 to 1818.” (from the abstract) Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 1319516160.

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