Erary and Scientific Cognitive Theory from 1749 to 1818
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University of Alberta The Embodied Imagination: British Romantic Cognitive Science by Lisa Ann Robertson A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies ©Lisa Ann Robertson Spring 2013 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Abstract 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. Acknowledgements I do not believe I could have done this project at any other university in Canada and it is in large part due to a supervisor with expertise in embodied Romanticism and the support of a strong committee. I would like to extend my thanks to my committee members Dr. James Mulvihill and Dr. Stan Ruecker. Dr. Mulvihill has high standards of academic prose and has greatly improved my profligate comma usage. Dr. Ruecker was consistently encouraging and helped me find the right tone to strike when engaging with other scholars, who, he reminds me, are my colleagues. I would also like to thank my supervisor Dr. David Miall for teaching me to be an independent scholar. It is an invaluable lesson. The feedback from Markus Iseli, University of Neuchatel, has been invaluable over these past couple of years, particularly on the chapters that discuss Coleridge, the conclusion, and the introduction. Our weekly Skype meetings and esoteric conversations about Romantic cognitive science made this project much more enjoyable than if I had written it in isolation. Thanks, too, to Dr. Laura Schechter for her input on the Wordsworth chapter. I would also like to thank my partner and friend, Martin Prendergast, for believing in me even in those moments when I did not. I am grateful for all the dinners, grocery shopping, and everything else that enabled me to sit in front of the computer writing for hours, days, and weeks on end as well as for making me take the occasional bike ride. He has helped me to maintain my perspective and to have some semblance of work/life balance. Contents Abstract Acknowledgments Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts Introduction 1 1. Spiritualising the Body: Enlightenment Beginnings 25 2. Animating the Body: British Empiricism’s Active Mind 67 3. “Ennobling Interchange of Action / From Within and Without”: 114 Wordsworth’s Theory of Enactive Cognition 4. “Schemes of Materialism & Immaterialism”: Coleridge’s Theory of 169 Enactive Cognition 5. Embodied Romanticism: Toward a Twenty-First-Century Theory 230 Works Cited 280 Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts Thomas Brown OZ Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin, M.D. By Thomas Brown, Esq., 1798. Samuel Taylor Coleridge BL Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 2 vols. 1817. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 1983. CL The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 3 vols. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 1956. CPW The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2 vols. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 1957. DN Destiny of Nations in CPW. “FIS” “Fears in Solitude” in CPW. “LTB” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” in CPW. RM Religious Musings in CPW. TT Table Talk. 2 vols. Ed. Carl Woodring, 1990. Humphry Davy CWD The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. 19 vols. 1839. Ed. John Davy, 1972. RI HD Humphry Davy’s Manuscript Notebooks held at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. John Thelwall AV Essay, Towards a Definition of Animal Vitality, 1793. TP The Peripatetic; or, sketches of the heart, of nature and society; in a series of politico-sentimental journals, in verse and prose, of the eccentric excursions of Sylvanus Theophrastus; supposed to be written by himself. 3 vols. 1793. Tom Wedgwood KU Manuscript Letters held at Keele University. WM Manuscript Notebooks held at the Wedgwood Museum. William Wordsworth “Ex.” “Expostulation and Reply” in PW. “Ode” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” in PW. Prel. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill, 1979. Pros. Prospectus to the Excursion in PW. PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. 5 vols. Ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 1966. PrW The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. 3 vols. Ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 1974. “TA” “Tintern Abbey” in in PW. “TT” “The Tables Turned” in PW. Quotations from poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth that are not mentioned in this table of abbreviations follow the editions listed above, unless otherwise noted. Note on quotations from manuscripts: Humphry Davy’s and Tom Wedgwood’s manuscript notebooks contain numerous abbreviations, crossed out words, words or sentences that have been added later, and words that are sometimes difficult to read. For the sake of readability in this text I have silently corrected many of these manuscript quirks. For example, all abbreviations have been written out in full without acknowledging that the original was abbreviated; crossed out text or words have been eliminated; and in cases where the context makes it clear what word was intended, it has been supplied with no note indicating that it was difficult to transcribe. Should this manuscript dissertation ever go into publication, all quotations will be double checked against the original archives to ensure that they were transcribed correctly and that the editorial interpolations are justified. When working from published notebooks and manuscripts that retain the original manuscript notations, I have also provided silent corrections. Readers who are interested in a particular quotation or argument are encouraged to examine the original publications. These primarily include Coleridge’s collected notebooks and letters and Wordsworth’s unpublished prose. 1 Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, stale paradigms, an echo-chamber mentality, and cults of personality. --V. S. Ramachandran Introduction This study runs the risk of undertaking the type of critical project that Jerome McGann inveighs against in The Romantic Ideology (1983). McGann urges critics not to fall prey to the Romantic ideology, which asserts that certain categories—transcendence, creativity, genius, the aesthetic, the sublime, imagination—defy analysis because they are originary, existing outside the bounds of space and time. The temptation, he claims, and the problem with most Romantic scholarship, is that it “abolishes the distance between its own (present) setting and its (removed) subject matter” by accepting the existence of these ahistorical categories and adopting them as its own (30). In the general scholarly view, these fundamental Romantic concepts are understood in terms of transcendentalist philosophy, which defines them as encounters with a numinous reality that exists separately from the material world. This dissertation, however, interrogates these concepts by examining them within the context of cognitive science discourse, both Romantic and twenty-first-century. It argues that they describe phenomenological experiences that have an embodied, rather than ahistorical significance, which makes them as important to critics in the twenty-first century as they were to the Romantics and to their predecessors. That is, these categories describe vital aspects of