Imagination in the Contemporary World and the Legacy of Romantic Literary Thought

about “the thing which is not,” as those all-logical Houyhnhnms of Jonathan Swift’s satirical imagination could not imagine – the right to be wrong that rests at the center of “Imagination” – this is a right and option we should guard as our unspeakably valuable creative heritage and treasured legacy from the Romantic tradition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Dr. Joseph Riehl (University of Louisiana at Lafayette) who suggested that I expand this essay.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. S.T. Coleridge Notebooks. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christianson, eds. 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

_______________________. Biographica Literaria. Chapts. 1-22. 1815. Etext available

at Project Gutenberg; for relevant extracts, see Imagination in Coleridge (below).

Butler, Marilyn. “Satire and the Images of self in the Romantic Period: the Long Tradition of Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris.” English Satire and the Satiric Tradition.  Ed. Claude Rawson.

Padstow, Great Britain: Basil Blackwell, 1984.  Pp. 209-225.

Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, Voice of the Shuttle e-link.

<http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/imagination.html>

acquired 9/22/2003

Edwards, S. T. “Master Concepts in Literary Study: The Moral Imagination”

<http://www.stedwards.edu/newc/green/moral.htm>   Pp. 1-5.

acquired 8/30/2000

Hobbes, Thomas. The Leviathan.

<http://osu.orst.edu/instruct/phl1302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-b.html> pp. 6-22

acquired 5/20/2004

“Imagination in Coleridge.” E-textual Extracts from University of Ottawa transcripts of The

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23