Reading Romanticism: Keats, Embodied Cognition, and the Work of Affect

Abstract

My dissertation argues that Romantic writers conceived of reading as an embodied social practice, understanding literary affect as a physiological connection between writer and reader. These writers turned the phenomenon of “feeling” into one of “feeling with.” My project traces the lasting influence of Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith on Romantic writers as they, in turn, shaped the literary culture that dominated the nineteenth century. Examining the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment alongside eighteenth-century medical knowledge, I argue that Romantic writers theorize the circulation of affect as a physiological phenomenon. Moreover, I situate this argument among the historical demands of the literary marketplace, as the emergence of genres like the novel and modes like the Gothic change the nature of aesthetic experience and, in turn, force writers to re-negotiate relationships between reader and writer, reader and text, writer and text. John Keats was a particularly important transitional figure. His reading and medical training were based in eighteenth-century moral philosophy and science; as a poet-physician, Keats’s thinking about embodied reading and social cognition led to poems that assume physiological changes occur as cognition happens in and across the mind, body, and the text. The sociability of Keats’s writing and reading, the various ways his poetry represents, genders and embodies the experience of reading, bring into focus the literary culture of social affect that takes shape throughout the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the introduction and four chapters of my dissertation, I put Keats’s model of reading as embodied social practice into conversation with a range of other writers: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Shelley, Barbauld, and Leigh Hunt.