Richard C. Sha argues that scientific understandings of the imagination indelibly shaped literary Romanticism. Challenging the idea that the imagination found a home only on the side of the literary, as a mental vehicle for transcending the worldly materials of the sciences, Sha shows how imagination helped to operationalize both scientific and literary discovery. Essentially, the imagination forced writers to consider the difference between what was possible and impossible while thinking about how that difference could be known.
Sha examines how the imagination functioned within physics and chemistry in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, neurology in Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas, physiology in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and obstetrics and embryology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He also demonstrates how the imagination was called upon to do aesthetic and scientific work using primary examples taken from the work of scientists and philosophers Davy, Dalton, Faraday, Priestley, Kant, Mary Somerville, Oersted, Marcet, Smellie, Swedenborg, Blumenbach, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Von Baer, among others.
Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason--but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.
"This impressive monograph will remain, I suspect, the most important resource on Romantic literature and science for many decades to come. This book changes how we view not only Romanticism but also the broader relationship between literature and science."--Eighteenth-Century Fiction
"A fascinating read and discovery of literary and scientific interconnections."--Review of English Studies
"For Sha, the concept of imagination is the key to unlocking relations between science and literature, since the faculty was viewed as central to scientific inquiry and literary creativity alike. Sha demonstrates that scientific thinkers, far from being antipathetic to the imagination, repeatedly indulged it and then tested its results experimentally. [I am] grateful for many penetrating insights in Sha's book."--Studies in Romanticism
"Richard C. Sha's exemplary Imagination and Science in Romanticism centers the Romantic imagination within scientific ways of knowing. Each chapter contains intriguing and thorough discussions of science, and subtle, detailed readings of literary texts. There is a wealth of wonderfully collated material here and fine-grained contextualization; readers interested in Romanticism and science will find the individual chapters rewarding."--Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900