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9781421425788 Academic Inspection Copy

Imagination and Science in Romanticism

  • ISBN-13: 9781421425788
  • Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Richard C. Sha
  • Price: AUD $135.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/10/2018
  • Format: Hardback 344 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Literary theory [DSA]
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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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One. Imagining Dynamic Matter: Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, and the Chemistry and Physics of Matter
Chapter Two. William Blake and the Neurological Imagination: Romantic Science, Nerves, and the Emergent Self
Chapter Three. The Physiological Imagination: Coleridge's Biographia
Chapter Four. Obstetrics and Embryology: Science and Imagination in Frankenstein
Notes
Works Cited
Index

""His book juxtaposes a vast number of primary sources and it is the range of these texts as well as Sha's analyses of them that make Imagination and Science in Romanticism a fascinating read and discovery of literary and scientific interconnections.""

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