The sciences of the senses in Romantic literature sight, touch, and vision Sophie Musitelli

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Laniel-Musitelli, Sophie, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in Romanticism

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romance-language literature--History and criticism.

Romance-language literature.

Senses and sensation in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2026

Summary:

"When British Romantic writers came into contact with experimental sciences, they encountered unfamiliar languages, methods and discourses, but they also discovered the experimental practices of modern scientists, their observation devices and their specific ways of sensing the world. The accommodation of the Romantics' senses to these strange sensorialities points to two main tropisms: a tropism towards sight, through prisms or telescopes, and a tropism towards touch, as scientists developed new methods to apprehend their objects through direct contact. The interest these writers showed in the development of the sciences of sensation thus invites a shift in our conception of the interactions between visibility and tactility in the Romantic imagination. What is the status of the 'image' in the Romantic 'imagination'? Is it purely visual? Or is there also something haptic to it? Ultimately, Sophie Musitelli asks, did the Romantics succeed in their attempts at turning touch into a visionary sense?"-- Cambridge Core

Contents:

Introduction : the romantic sensorium

The soft vibrations of touch : Percy Shelley’s last poems

Before our eyes : Erasmus Darwin and William Blake on the origins of the senses

Eye contact : Thomas De Quincey on sight and touch

The living eyes of heaven : Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley on astronomical observation

Senses of stone : Erasmus Darwin, William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley on the mineral and the sensory

Other senses than ours : non-human visions from Erasmus Darwin to John Clare

After the senses : sensory remanence after death in John Keats’s Isabella and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Coda : on the sunlit limits of the night

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (Cambridge Core, viewed May 11, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version Laniel-Musitelli, Sophie Sciences of the senses in Romantic literature

ISBN:

9781009646772

100964677X

OCLC:

1546825989

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license