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theses

This thesis traces the interchanges of culture and cognition that helped to produce a unique eighteenth-century discourse of reading as a transport into an imaginary world. The figure of reading as a mode of transportation is present during many historical periods; however, it becomes more culturally prominent in eighteenth-century Britain, and it is during this period that “literary transportation” takes on many of the discursive features that have come down to us today – notably the association of enjoyable reading with the experience of vicarious spatial relocation of the self, and the particular use of this trope of vicarious relocation as a slander against bad reading, or “escapism.” I claim that this foundational work on the figure of transportation was enabled by eighteenth-century writers broad interest in exploring the psychology of imagination. Following work by neuroscientists such as Raymond Mar, I treat literary self-projection as part of a fundamental cognitive capacity for temporal and spatial imaginative self-projections of many kinds, including self-projection into one’s own past (autobiographical memory) or future (future-prospection), into another’s “shoes” (sympathy). Eighteenth-century writers were unusually engaged in explorations and speculations of human cognition; I claim that this cognitively and neurologically basic function of imaginative self-projection, “autonoetic consciousness,” is a prominent theme in those explorations – one that has been overlooked by conventional historical studies of imagination in the period. A broad constellation of key poetic forms and literary movements – loco-descriptive poetry, theories of the sublime, travel narrative, Romantic visionary poetics, sentimental novels, even Gothic terror – all engage centrally with the dynamics of self-projection, both as theoretical topic, and as performative literary practice. Reading these movements as close psychological kin, I argue for a culture of imagination that wavers between ecstatic embrace and fear of transportation’s dissolutions of the boundaries of selfhood, breaking away from the familiar genealogy of “creative imagination.” I trace these dynamics through the seminal “Preromantic” poems – Thomson’s The Seasons, Young’s Night Thoughts, and Cowper’s The Task – along with Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and, finally, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” producing a history of eighteenth-century poetic imagination informed by the cognitive underpinnings of imaginative self-projection.

ETD_6346

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Elizabeth Oldfather

doi:10.7282/T3XK8HDZ

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.