The creative imagination : Enlightenment to Romanticism

In a work of astonishing intellectual range, James Engell traces the evolution of the creative imagination, from its emergence in British empirical thought through its flowering in Romantic art and literature. The notion of a creative imagination, Engell shows, was the most powerful and important development of the eighteenth century. It grew simultaneously in literature, criticism, philosophy, psychology, religion, and science, attracting such diverse minds as Hobbes, Addison, Gerard, Goethe, Kant, and Coleridge. Indeed, rather than discussing merely the abstract notion of the imagination, Engell examines the community of thinkers, especially in England and Germany, who joined to pursue and develop what became the most fascinating and suggestive concept of modern Western thought. For as the imagination became the dominant subject of literature, its meanings multiplied. Finally it came to be seen as the crown of artistic creation and as the mediator in the ongoing dialectic between matter and spirit, materialism and transcendentalism. Part One. Probing the Source 21 1/The Essential Idea 23 2/Empiricism in Earnest: Hobbes and Locke 31 3/Claims of the Spirit: Shaftesbury and Leibniz 42 4/The Creative Impulse: Addison Through Akenside and the 1740s 53 5/The Inner Structure of Life: Hume and Johnson 71 Part Two. A Broader Stage 83 6/New Aesthetics and Criticism: The Associationists and the Scots 85 7/Investigators of Genius: Gerard and Duff 98 Part Three. The German Foundation 109 8/Shadows a Century Long 111 9/The New Focus of Literature and Myth 122 10/The Great Metamorphosis: Tetens and Kant 138 Part Four. Faith in the Imagination 161 11/The Psyche Reaches Out: Sympathy 163 12/The Psyche Reaches Out: Coalescence and the Chemistry of the Mind 181 13/Distinctions Between Fancy and Imagination 192 14/A Plateau in Britain and Developments in America 204 15/Organic Sensibility: Hazlitt 217 Part Five. Literary Explorations 235 16/The New Philosophers’ Stone and the New Pierian Spring 237 17/The Prophetic and Visionary: Blake and Shelley 264 18/Wordsworth 285 19/Goethe and Keats 297 Part Six. Harmony of Being 319 20/Schelling 321 21/Coleridge 348 Select Bibliography 389 Notes 401 Index 427 In a work of astonishing intellectual range, James Engell traces the evolution ofthe creative imagination, from its emergence in British empirical thought through its flowering in Romantic art and literature.

The notion of a creative imagination, Engell shows, was the most powerful and important development of the eighteenth century. It grew simultaneously in literature, criticism, philosophy, psychology, religion, and science, attracting such diverse minds as Hobbes, Addison, Gerard, Goethe, Kant, and Coleridge. Indeed, rather than discussing merely the abstract notion of the imagination, Engell examines the community of thinkers, especially in England and Germany, who joined to pursue and develop what became the most fascinating and suggestive concept of modern Western thought. For as the imagination became the dominant subject of literature, its meanings multiplied. Finally it came to be seen as the crown of artistic creation and as the mediator in the ongoing dialectic between matter and spirit, materialism and transcendentalism.