Abstract
What does it mean for a study of eighteenth-century vitalism to conclude with a reading of Romantic-period writers? Where is the dividing line between an eighteenth-century vitalist language of nature, and fully fledged, transcendent Romantic organicism? And if, as the previous chapter asserts, a language of vitality and animation has a suggestive and fruitful figurative presence beyond natural philosophical contexts, what does this suggest about literature’s relation to science at the end of the eighteenth century?
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Notes
David Fairer’s Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford University Press, 2009) also challenges an outmoded opposition of eighteenth-century mechanism and Romantic organicism — an opposition which, as Fairer points out, goes back to M. H. Abrams’ The Mirror and The Lamp. Fairer argues that eighteenth-century thinking in a number of areas, from personal identity to history to poetic tradition, could arguably be described as ‘organic’, and what he characterises as an ‘eighteenth-century organic’ needs to be understood on its own terms, distinct from the Romantic organic of, for instance, the mature Coleridge. See also Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1680–1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Charles Armstrong, Romantic Organicism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 5. For Tilottama Rajan’s discussion of the organic analogies which were frequently deployed in writings of many kinds between 1780 and 1830, see her ‘Organicism’, English Studies in Canada, 30:4 (2004), 46–50 (p. 50). See also Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism.
See, for instance, James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) is an obvious theoretical landmark here, but for representative work in the Romantic period see, for instance, Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), or Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility. For further discussion of this point, see the opening section of my ‘Feigning Fictions’.
Frederick Burwick, Approaches to Organic Form (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987), pp. ix–x.
Rajan, ‘Organicism’, and Tilottama Rajan, ‘The Unavowable Community of Idealism: Coleridge and the Life Sciences’, European Romantic Review, 14:4 (2003), 395–416.
For the Romantic century, see Susan Wolfson, ‘50–50? Phone a Friend? Speculating on a Romantic Century, 1750–1850’, European Romantic Review, 11:1 (2000), 1–11. Also on the question of periodisation, see Michael McKeon, ‘Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century’, Studies in English Literature, 45:3 (2005), 707–82, Clifford Siskin, ‘Personification and Community: Literary Change in the Mid and Late Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15:4 (1982), 371–401, and Miriam L. Wallace, ‘Enlightened Romanticism or Romantic Enlightenment?’, in Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing Enlightenment’, ed. Miriam L. Wallace (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 1–20.
Cunningham, ‘Old Physiology’, p. 649. Richard Sha, Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) also finds Cunningham’s distinction between physiology pre- and post-1800 a significant one: see ch. 2.
Patricia Spacks also singles out the 1790s for special consideration in debates over periodisation in literary history, though her particular concern is with the novel. See Patricia M. Spacks, ‘How We See: The 1790s’, in Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing Enlightenment’, ed. Miriam L. Wallace (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 179–88.
Mary Poovey, ‘The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism’, Critical Inquiry, 27:3 (2001), 408–38 (p. 412).
Poovey, ‘Model System’, p. 418. See also Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford University Press, 1988), Siskin, The Work of Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’.
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Conclusion: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism, Romanticism, Literature and the Disciplines. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_8
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