This panel would be a first, at least in recent memory: although the topic of epistemology has undoubtedly come up before in Romantic literature-focused panels, there hasn’t been a panel devoted to Romantic epistemology or knowledge in the last eighteen years (according to the MLA’s Program Archive, 2004-2020, and the 2021 program). Yet Romantic literature is rich with epistemic deliberations. Consider William Wordsworth’s and Percy Shelley’s manifestos which argue for the value of literary forms of knowledge against scientific and economic ones, the reflections on scientific knowledge in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), or John Keats’s embrace of “negative capability,” of “remaining content with half-knowledge.”
This session is informed by exciting work on Romantic-era epistemological issues. Interactions between literary and scientific approaches to knowing have been illuminated by panelist, Richard Sha, in Imagination and Science in Romanticism (2018) and by Alan Richardson (British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind [2001]) and Dahlia Porter (Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism [2018]). Other scholars have looked at the legacies of Enlightenment thought (e.g., Adela Pinch’s Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen [1996]) and encyclopedic projects (Seth Rudy’s Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain [2014]). Others have studied particularly literary forms of knowing and unknowing (Anahid Nersessian’s “Literary Agnotology” (2017); Robin Valenza’s “How Literature Becomes Knowledge” (2009) concerns Samuel Johnson, but its insights are relevant here.). Approaching the topic by way of media studies, Yohei Igarashi has written about large-scale data collection in the period (The Connected Condition [2020]), while related work in book history has studied the material aspects of knowing (Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books [2009]) and techniques of information management (Jillian Hess’s forthcoming The Commonplace Method). Finally, Nikki Hessell’s Romantic Literature and the Colonised World (2018) highlights indigenous forms of knowing evidenced in the reception of translated Romantic literature throughout the British empire.
Building on such work, this panel pushes Romantic epistemology in new directions, and joins senior scholars and graduate students to foster a conversation across career stages. Sha’s paper considers the experience of being overwhelmed by data (sensory and numerical) and offers a new way to think about aesthetics and epistemology alike. Sha shows that the sublime, as theorized by Immanuel Kant, runs parallel to investigations by Thomas Bayes in statistics and Mary Somerville in astronomy and calculus about how to move from mere information to prediction. Toby Benis examines the genre of the “road book,” which quantified domestic travel distances and times before the better known railroad boom of the 1840s. Benis suggests that these overlooked guidebooks participated in nothing less than a shift in Britons’ conceptions of knowable space and community, as discernible in William Wordsworth’s early poetry. Zachary Mann’s paper charts how a Romantic-era debate about technology – the supplanting of handmade double-press lace by flimsier single-press lace produced by mechanical framework knitting – inflected anxieties about literary authenticity. Inspired by the shared etymology of “text” and “textile,” Mann reveals that the concerns about plagiarism, prolificness, and automaticity that clung to Lord Byron and Walter Scott were tied to the public’s eroding confidence in the ability to tell truth from fabrication. Finally, Sarah Weston approaches Romantic epistemology by way of disability studies and book history. She looks to Romantic information encryption and storage systems for the blind – from “string writing” to Braille – alongside William Blake’s printing method, and argues that the epistemology of blindness blurred the lines between information and knowledge, feeling and reading, and human and machine. Together, these papers draw on the histories of science, philosophy, infrastructure, technology, books, and disability to advance our understanding of Romantic-era ways of knowing, with implications for today’s epistemic crises. Each paper will be strictly held to fifteen minutes to ensure at least fifteen minutes of Q&A and discussion.