Romanticism's Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability

In Romanticism's Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability, John Savarese reassesses early relationships between Romantic poetry and the sciences, uncovering a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature and demonstrating earlier engagement of cognitive approaches than has heretofore been examined at length. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers framed poetry as a window into the mind's original, underlying structures of thought and feeling. While that Romantic argument helped forge a well-known relationship between poetry and introspective or private consciousness, Savarese argues that it also made poetry the staging ground for a more surprising set of debates about the naturally social mind. From James Macpherson's forgeries of ancient Scottish poetry to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, poets mined traditional literatures and recent scientific conjectures to produce alternate histories of cognition, histories that variously emphasized the impersonal, the intersubjective, and the collective. By bringing together poetics, philosophy of mind, and the physiology of embodied experience-and with major studies of James Macpherson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott-Romanticism's Other Minds recovers the interdisciplinary conversations at the heart of Romantic-era literary theory.

Author: John Savarese
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 10/14/2020
Pages: 220
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.03lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.63d
ISBN13: 9780814214503
ISBN10: 0814214509
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | Poetry
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 18th Century

About the Author
John Savarese is Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.

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