When British Romantic writers came into contact with experimental sciences, they encountered unfamiliar languages, methods and discourses, but they also discovered the experimental practices of modern scientists, their observation devices and their specific ways of sensing the world. The accommodation of the Romantics' senses to these strange sensorialities points to two main tropisms: a tropism towards sight, through prisms or telescopes, and a tropism towards touch, as scientists developed new methods to apprehend their objects through direct contact. The interest these writers showed in the development of the sciences of sensation thus invites a shift in our conception of the interactions between visibility and tactility in the Romantic imagination. What is the status of the 'image' in the Romantic 'imagination'? Is it purely visual? Or is there also something haptic to it? Ultimately, Sophie Musitelli asks, did the Romantics succeed in their attempts at turning touch into a visionary sense?
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Explores how Romantic writers envisioned new sensory modalities in a free and imaginative dialogue with the sciences of their time.
Introduction: the romantic sensorium; Part I. The Advent of Sensation:
1. The waves: 'the soft vibration of [ ] touch' in Percy Shelley's last
poems;
2. Before our eyes: scientific observation and the origins of the
senses from Erasmus Darwin to William Blake; Part II. Senses Out of Sight:
3.
Eye contact: sight, touch, and vision in Thomas De quincey's confessions of
an English opium-eater and suspiria de profundis;
4. The 'living eyes of
heaven': astronomical observation and poetic vision from Anna Letitia
Barbauld to William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley; Part III. Outside our
Senses:
5. Senses of stone: the mineral and the sensory in poems by Erasmus
Darwin, by William Wordsworth and by Percy Shelley;
6. Other senses than
ours: non-human visions from Erasmus Darwin to John Clare;
7. After the
senses: sensory remanence after death in John Keats's Isabella and Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein; Coda: on the 'sunlit limits of the night';
Bibliography.
Sophie Musitelli is Professor at the University of Lille and Honorary Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses on the interactions among literature, the sciences, and philosophy in the Romantic era. She is the current chair of the French Society for the Study of English Romanticism.
