Review of the hardback: 'Noel Jackson, in his outstanding Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, answers the questions that 'The Affective Fallacy' leaves hanging and does so by resorting to romantic forebears: why did matters of feeling and perception press so strongly on scientists, politicians and poets at this historical juncture and, more searchingly, what larger implications - and legacies - are entailed when we ask poetry to 'make us feel?' ... The mutual emergence and co-implication of romantic poetics and romantic-era science of the nervous system serve to anchor Jackson's analysis. His remarkable archival work and theoretical sophistication are marshaled around a series of organizing terms: suggestion, autonomy, common sense, and consent (or consensus). All these terms, Jackson shows convincingly, are implicated in the period understanding of what it is to feel and make feel.' Literature Compass
Review of the hardback: 'I found myself won over by this book. Jackson is continually incisive, and Romantic poetry as he sees it actively and thoughtfully positions itself within its own critical history. As a spirited defense of Romantic aesthetics, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry shows the extent to which even Romantic sensation was conditioned by the science of the era.' The Wordsworth Circle
Review of the hardback: 'Positioned between phenomenological and materialist approaches, Noel Jackson's Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry stresses Romanticism's language of embodied sensual experience and re-establishes its crucial ties to eighteenth-century empirical philosophy's effort to delineate how the mind and the emotions function ... In chapters on William Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, Jackson argues that writing is a 'suggestive practice' through which chiefly political ideas may be communicated to other subjects; that Coleridgean lyric, affiliated with the analytic orientation of eighteenth-century common sense philosophy, joins self-expression and self-observation to dramatize self-consciousness as suspended between the subject speaking and the subject being observed; and that Keats's familiarity with early brain theory enables an aesthetic practice in which the sensuous and the abstract, like the mind and the nervous system, are mutually dependent ... [An] impressive study.' SEL: Studies in English Literature
