Embodiment, Aesthetics, and Ethics in Romantic Literature and Science (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850)

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 belonging to an earlier era of scholarship. Examining writings by David Hartley, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, this groundbreaking work recuperates organicism as a crucial aesthetic and ethical category. It argues that organicism remains relevant today because it offers an alternative to the Cartesian epistemology that continues to structure twenty-first-century worldviews, and that it is both an embodied experience and a metaphor for relationality that defines organization in terms of processes rather than static structures. Twenty-first-century cognitive science, neurophenomenology, and dynamic systems theory are explained clearly and provide fresh insight into canonical literary and scientific texts, while embodied organicism is situated in the cultural and historiographic contexts in which it originated. The first book published in over fifty years to defend Romantic organicism, this ambitious study is highly accessible and readable by a wide audience.