Book ID: CBB250163909

Imagination and Science in Romanticism (2018)

unapi

Sha, Richard C. (Author)


Johns Hopkins University Press


Publication Date: 2018
Physical Details: 344 pages
Language: English

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.

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Reviewed By

Review Kristen Carlson (2020) Review of "Imagination and Science in Romanticism". Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology (pp. 147-149). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB250163909/

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Authors & Contributors
Charles Bernstein
Faflak, Joel
Verderame, Michael
Nese Devenot
Burke, Edmund, III
Davis, Diana K
Concepts
Science and literature
Imagination
Romanticism
Science and culture
Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge
Science and art
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
Great Britain
Europe
Middle and Near East
London (England)
Sweden
North Africa
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