Thesis ID: CBB749957595

Dreams in Romantic Science and Literature (2022)

unapi

Romantic-era discourses on dreams often concern methodology, or how an individual processes knowledge and experience. As the debate rages in Romantic science between rational deduction and empirical induction, creative authors seize on the disunity. Both the deductive and the inductive methodologies of Romantic science relegate dreams to unscientific thought, and Romantic poets and novelists harness the ambiguity of dreams in scientific discourses to question the methodological approaches on which the scientific community is built. Dreams emerge as a Romantic epistemological problem in the Scottish Enlightenment. Romantic literary scholars interested in dreams neglect the debate between David Hume and Andrew Baxter concerning the immateriality of the soul, a debate that may have cost Hume the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University. Baxter argues against Hume’s skeptical and empirical philosophy of mind and articulates a rationally argued metaphysics favoring the existence of an immaterial soul. Baxter builds his metaphysics on the inertness of matter and Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, and his work articulates a dream theory in which disembodied spirits cause dreams through a supernatural interaction with human physiology in which they activate the senses immaterially. The debate between Hume and Baxter occurs as the concepts of vitality emerge in Scottish physiology that instigate the debates on dreams in Romantic medicine. Scottish physiologists first incorporate the concept of the immaterial soul into scientific discourse through the concept of vitality, the study of the unverifiable principle or power that creates and sustains life. This concept of vitality and the resonance of dreams in early physiological discourses structure the medical concepts driving the Romantic vitality debates. This dissertation reconstructs those cultural discourses through close-readings of both scientific texts and literary dreams in the works of various Romantic authors and artists: including Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Henry Fuseli, James Beattie, William Lawrence, John Abernethy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, James Curry, and John Keats. These authors consider whether these dreams and nightmares originate from spirits, the body, or the imagination, and literary authors utilize an aesthetic of dreaming to interrogate the methodologies and the epistemology of the emerging sciences.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB749957595/

Similar Citations

Book Richardson, Alan; (2001)
British Romanticism and the science of the mind (/isis/citation/CBB000100059/)

Article Cornejo, Carlos; (2015)
Searching for the Microcosm: A Glimpse into the Roots of Vygotsky's Holism (/isis/citation/CBB001551417/)

Thesis Johnson, Jeffrey C.; (2012)
Anatomies of the Soul and the Self, From Galen to Romanticism (/isis/citation/CBB001560970/)

Article Stephanie L. Schatz; (2015)
Lewis Carroll’s Dream-child and Victorian Child Psychopathology (/isis/citation/CBB058347482/)

Thesis Kamerbeek, Christopher; (2010)
The Ghost and the Corpse: Figuring the Mind/Brain Complex at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (/isis/citation/CBB001567186/)

Thesis Malane, Rachel Ann; (2004)
“Sex in Mind”: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences (/isis/citation/CBB001562029/)

Book Carmela Morabito; (2020)
Il motore della mente. Il movimento nella storia delle scienze cognitive (/isis/citation/CBB028669021/)

Article Joshua Bauchner; (2021)
Fechner on a Walk: Everyday Investigations of the Mind-Body Relationship (/isis/citation/CBB085736438/)

Article Christopher Fowles; (2020)
The Heart of Flesh: Nietzsche on Affects and the Interpretation of the Body (/isis/citation/CBB463078060/)

Article Calloway B. Scott; (2023)
The Body, Experience, and the History of Dream-Science in Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica (/isis/citation/CBB907934889/)

Article Cortuo, Esteban; (2010)
Mario Roso de Luna (1872--1931) Un ocultista peculiar (/isis/citation/CBB001201534/)

Book Cowan, Michael J.; (2008)
Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (/isis/citation/CBB001230888/)

Thesis Yanan Qizhi; (2020)
Dream Culture in Early Modern Lutheranism, 1530-1730 (/isis/citation/CBB358204226/)

Article Sha, Richard C.; (2009)
Toward a Physiology of the Romantic Imagination (/isis/citation/CBB001023598/)

Book Joel Faflak; (2017)
Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (/isis/citation/CBB567211992/)

Authors & Contributors
Schatz, Stephanie L.
Robert John Schimelpfenig
Qizhi, Yanan
Faflak, Joel
Fowles, Christopher
Calloway B. Scott
Concepts
Psychology
Philosophy
Mind and body
Science and literature
Romanticism
Dreams
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
Ancient
17th century
Early modern
Places
Great Britain
Europe
England
Leipzig (Germany)
United States
Russia
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment