Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (Romanticism in perspective: texts, cultures, histories) Book

Romantic Dynamics: the Poetics of Physicality creatively collides English Romantic poetry with a wide range of concepts from contemporary theoretical physics in an attempt to track shared assumptions in their models of material and mental dynamics. The work calls into question the perceived tension between Romantic poetics and physical theory and links such perceptions to recent backlashes against various modes of postmodern criticism. Romantic Dynamics uncovers considerable confluence between the physical models of mind and matter constructed within Romantic poetry and those articulated by contemporary physical theory, from cosmology to neuroscience. This interdisciplinary work traces the elaboration of dynamical models of cosmos and consciousness in works by Blake, Byron, Coleridge, the Shelleys and Wordsworth, finding in those works an exploration of the interpenetration of psyche and phenomena. This model, the author argues, establishes a new metaphoric terrain liberated from the classical mechanics of Newtonian thought and more easily traversed with models articulated by Bohr, Einstein and Hawking.Read More