The Sciences of the Senses in Romantic Literature : Sight, Touch, and Vision

Exploring Romantic writers' free and imaginative confrontation with eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scientific research, Sophie Musitelli reveals how the physiology of the senses allowed them to envision new modalities of sensation, in an attempt at turning touch into a visionary sense.

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?