Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism: 120 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 120)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Annotated, 6/25/2020
EAN 9781108408561, ISBN10: 1108408567
Paperback, 316 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Exploring a topic at the intersection of science, philosophy and literature in the late eighteenth century Dahlia Porter traces the history of induction as a writerly practice - as a procedure for manipulating textual evidence by selective quotation - from its roots in Francis Bacon's experimental philosophy to its pervasiveness across Enlightenment moral philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, and literature itself. Porter brings this history to bear on an omnipresent feature of Romantic-era literature, its mixtures of verse and prose. Combining analyses of printed books and manuscripts with recent scholarship in the history of science, she elucidates the compositional practices and formal dilemmas of Erasmus Darwin, Robert Southey, Charlotte Smith, Maria Edgeworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In doing so she re-examines the relationship between Romantic literature and eighteenth-century empiricist science, philosophy, and forms of art and explores how Romantic writers engaged with the ideas of Enlightenment empiricism in their work.
Introduction
Romanticism's composite orders
1. Knowledge, text, mind
a history of inductive method
Part I. Making Texts
The Annotated Poem
2. Erasmus Darwin's prose of the world
induction and the philosophical poem
3. Poetics of the commonplace
Robert Southey's analogical romance
The First Landing Place
Prose Notes and Embedded Verse
Part II. Making Minds
Poetry in Prose
4. Methodizing the mind
experimental education and the poetic excerpt
5. Coleridge and literary criticism
the pains of induction
Final Landing Place
The Composite Incarnate.