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

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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. Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese Half title page Series title page Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION POETRY’S DIVIDED FACULTIES CHAPTER SUMMARIES: OTHER MINDS, ALTERNATE HISTORIES CHAPTER 1 • Poetry, Conjecture, and Experiment CONJECTURAL HISTORY AND EXPERIMENTAL POETRY SOLITARY AND SOCIAL POETIC ORIGINS: ADDISON, BLACKWELL, BLAIR POETIC FIGURE AND SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE: LOWTH, HERDER TWO THEORIES OF THE SOCIALLY DISTRIBUTED MIND: PERCY, RITSON CHAPTER 2 • Ossian’s Folk Psychology MENTAL INVESTIGATIONS IN ABERDEEN FROM ANIMISM TO MATERIALISM FROM COMMON SENSE TO FOLK PSYCHOLOGY THE MIND’S “GENUINE REMAINS” MATERIALISM AND LITERARY METHOD CHAPTER 3 • Barbauld and the Growth of the Poet’s Mind “MIND, EMBODIED AND EMBEDDED”: BARBAULD, AIKIN, PRIESTLEY INWARD FACULTIES, OUTWARD SCAFFOLDING: FROM REID TO BARBAULD DISSENT’S CONJECTURAL HISTORIES: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, SCAFFOLDING BARBAULD’S ORALITY CHAPTER 4 • Wordsworth’s Scattered Minds WHERE DOES THINKING HAPPEN? FROM OTHER MINDS TO DISTRIBUTED MINDS ALMOST DOUBLE: THINKING WITH NATURE AROUND 1802 A POWER LIKE ONE OF NATURE’S CHAPTER 5 • “Incoherent Song”: Scott and the Margins of Sociability “WILD BOYS” AND POETS SKEPTICAL, SENTIMENTAL, AND MODULAR LITERATURES BALLAD COLLECTORS AND SKULL COLLECTORS AFTERWORD • Reading One’s Own Mind Bibliography Index