Imagination and Science in Romanticism

Imagination and Science in Romanticism shifts the terms in which imaginative theory, in literature and science alike, can be understood.

The evidence across chapters from both literature and science fully substantiates Sha's central claim for an expanded sense of the imagination that includes Romantic science and reason along with it. Beyond a significant contribution to criticism of Romantic literature, this book is a rich resource and model for how to do interdisciplinary scholarship well.

An engaging account of how creative writers and scientists during the Romantic period understood the place of the imagination in their work. Sha's book makes a real contribution to our understanding of the extent to which Romantic writers responded to new ideas that were emerging in contemporary science. The chapters on Shelley and Blake, who both sought to combine visionary poetics with science, are especially well done.

It has taken generations to rectify the false split about art and science as radically distinct cultures. Richard Sha’s Imagination and Science in Romanticism occupies a noble place in the flow of scholarship aiming to topple the dichotomy.

In this book, Richard C. Sha explodes once and for all the myth of a Romantic hostility to science. By recovering the science in key Romantic texts, Sha restores the inherent materialism of the imagination, then as now regarded as an indispensable pathway for understanding the object world. A major contribution to scholarship.  

Lucid and buoyant in its convictions, Richard Sha’s book is a salutary return to an often-dismissed term in Romantic studies. Sha’s knowledge and critical eye are evident as he asserts a Romantic imagination that is at once generative and regulative. This book will be a key player in any contemporary reflection on science, literature, and theories of the material. 

In this work, Sha brilliantly reconceptualizes a classic concept of Romanticism: the imagination. Sha reveals how, by seeking to discipline the imagination, the various practices of Romantic literary and scientific authors linked the two fields in this period.

Richard Sha’s groundbreaking volume persuasively demonstrates how imagination played a vital role in both the sciences and the literature of the Romantic age, serving as a powerful bridge between these two apparently distant fields of human knowledge. The book is a milestone for scholars of the period and promises to remain an indispensable point of reference for many years to come.  

Imagination and science in Romanticism are usually regarded separately. Sha brilliantly and convincingly demonstrates how closely they are, in fact, connected. It's Einstein, after all, who later said, 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Sha’s book is impressive not only for its forceful conceptual argument but also for the detailed empirical research and historical interpretation on which that argument is so imaginatively built.

A compelling account of how sciences generated an epistemology of imagination sensitive to dynamic forces and imponderable matter in a period when arts and science still enjoyed an intensely symbiotic relationship. Ranging across literature and connecting British and German science, this is a book Romanticists cannot afford to ignore.