Description
- Abstract:
- The purpose of this dissertation is to reevaluate the relationship between the aesthetics we call Romantic and the abstracting scientific procedures that have been underappreciated as Romantic. I proceed by example, attempting to demonstrate that some major cultural producers from the period were critically engaged, and often quite technically, with problems of abstract representation that also fascinated, puzzled, and oftentimes terrified the more scientific writers I pair them with. Therefore, where previous work on Romantic science and literature has tended to reinforce widespread assumptions regarding the period’s organicist aesthetics, mine revisits what has subtly been argued by more critical work to be the period’s critique of such ideology, in part by shifting the focus on what science means in the period. As might be expected, this necessitates a shift in which disciplines are focused on, and I believe it is one of the more worthwhile aspects of this dissertation that it has spent a good deal of time with scientific disciplines that often go untreated in interdisciplinary work on the period. Writers working implicitly with the organicist account of Romantic science have tended to focus on questions of sensation, the bodily, and the natural, and so favor chemistry, the weather, biology, and to a lesser extent ecology. This project’s interdisciplinary companion discourses are, by contrast, geometry, cosmology, and political economy. These problems are explored in the texts of William Blake, Immanuel Kant, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Caroline and William Herschel, Thomas De Quincey, and David Ricardo, among others.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Mulligan, John C.,
"Romantic Experiment: The Second Scientific Revolution and 19th-century English Literature"
(2015).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0RR1WN4
