Embodiment, Aesthetics, and Ethics in Romantic Literature and Science

Embodiment, Aesthetics, and Ethics in Romantic Literature and Science makes an unprecedented intervention into debates about Romantic organicism, a topic that has long been dismissed as a failed ideological project that belongs to an earlier era of scholarship. Examining writings by David Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, Lisa Ann Robertson recuperates organicism as a crucial aesthetic and ethical category. Organicism remains relevant today because it offers an alternative to the Cartesian epistemology that continues to structure twenty-first-century worldviews. Robertson argues that organicism is both an embodied experience and a metaphor for relationality that defines organization in terms of processes rather than static structures. She analyses classic texts using methods drawn from the post-classical sciences, which were unavailable to scholars before this century. It is the first book to interrogate Romantic organicism using these new theoretical frameworks. Twenty-first-century cognitive science, neuro-phenomenology, and dynamic systems theory are explained clearly and provide fresh insight into canonical scientific and literary texts. Robertson also situates embodied organicism in the cultural and historiographic contexts in which organicism originated. The first book published in over fifty years to defend Romantic organicism, this ambitious study is also highly accessible and readable by a wide audience.