Premium
Reimagining the Romantic Imagination: Embodied, Proto‐Cognitive Psychologies in Joanna Baillie's Introductory Discourse and Orra
Author(s) -
Bergen Daniel
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12118
Subject(s) - embodied cognition , romance , passion , tragedy (event) , romanticism , passions , perspective (graphical) , interpretation (philosophy) , philosophy , cognition , psychology , literature , western thought , epistemology , psychoanalysis , art , social psychology , linguistics , neuroscience , visual arts
In the Biographia Literaria , Coleridge describes the primary imagination as a divinely inspired, supreme faculty of the mind – “a repetition in the finite of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I AM.” This spiritually understood, disembodied, deistic interpretation of the brain's creative center has come to signify the Romantic dualist perspective of the imagination; however, contemporary research in the fields of Romanticism and Cultural Cognitive Studies suggests that there may be a considerable amount to learn from reconsidering Romantic era notions of an embodied psychology. In that spirit, this essay will seek a new paradigm for an embodied, Romantic imagination, considering it from the perspective of the Scottish playwright, poetess, and theorist, Joanna Baillie. Through careful analysis of the Introductory Discourse , her preface to the inaugural Series of Plays on the Passions (originally published in 1798), and Orra , her tragedy on the singular passion of fear, as well as through the use of cognitive literary theory, I will demonstrate how Joanna Baillie proto‐cognitively envisions the imagination as a significant means through which the embodied mind relates to and understands the world.