Abstract
The introductory chapter sketches the historical context for Fancy’s emergence in England at the turn of the seventeenth century. It also outlines the argument’s substantial critical stakes for the fields of aesthetics, imagination, the rise of the novel, and the history of women’s writing.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Coleridge’s description epitomizes how imagination came to be understood in England and Europe in the Romantic period, there were certainly exceptions. Many of these exceptions have not been given much weight in twentieth-century scholarship. See William Taylor, English Synonyms Discriminated (London: Stevens & Co., Printers, 1850); Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy; or, Selections from the English Poets (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1891); and even William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. V (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1854), 287, for examples that invest Fancy with a great deal more power and animation than Coleridge’s version and are much more in keeping with the Fancy that this project traces.
- 2.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions (New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1834), 56.
- 3.
The German Idealist influence on Coleridge’s understanding of the Imagination has been extensively explored by a number of scholars. See James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), to which I respond in more detail below, for what is still the most thorough account of the cross-influences between German and English thinkers regarding the “creative imagination.” M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) and Forest Pyle, The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) also explore the philosophical context of the Romanticist Imagination.
- 4.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 168.
- 5.
M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 9th Ed. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009), 109.
- 6.
My study is indebted to Engell’s brilliant scholarship. Importantly, Engell does give some attention to distinctions made between Fancy and Imagination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see, especially, pp. 172–183). Despite his attention to the many definitions of the imagination available in the eighteenth century, however, the underlying logic of his argument unifies them into the Romanticist “creative imagination.” I agree, then, with Forest Pyle’s pithy critique of Engell’s narrative: “For Engell, the imagination may speak in several languages, but it speaks, ultimately, with one mind” (The Ideology of Imagination, 179, note 1).
- 7.
Engell, The Creative Imagination, 6.
- 8.
Ernest Lee Tuveson’s The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romantics (New York: Gordian Press, 1974) emphasizes the eighteenth century as a radical break in the understanding of the imagination; Tuveson notes Abram’s influence on his argument in his Introduction. The influence of this model is still apparent in more recent treatments of the imagination; see, for instance, Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 9.
See Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
- 10.
John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xi.
- 11.
Jeffrey Robinson, Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism (New York: Palgrave, 2006). Although Robinson’s period emphasis (Romanticism) and generic focus (poetry) differ from mine, his wonderful chapter on “Fanciphobia” is an ideal companion to this Introduction. In it, he points out how a deep-seated suspicion of Fancy’s simultaneous expansiveness, dispersiveness, and political progressiveness lead “poets and critics, then and now” to “attempt[] to diffuse [its power] by forms of belittlement” (1). His chapter thus suggests another, more sinister motive for the suppression of Fancy in both Romanticism and in twentieth-century criticism.
- 12.
See, for example, the very first footnote in John Guillory’s book, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), quoted in more detail in the next footnote.
- 13.
After Abrams, critics routinely conflate Fancy and Imagination. John Guillory represents this trend when he writes, in the first footnote of his book: “The existence of both Greek and Latin words for the same faculty of mind afforded numerous writers the opportunity to make distinctions between imagination and fancy. None of these distinctions, however, much affected the history of the idea and the great majority of writers before Coleridge (including Spenser and Milton) treat the terms as synonymous.” See Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 1, note 1. There have been a few exceptions to this ubiquitous trend. It is telling that, before Abrams’s influential publications, there is an active vein of literary criticism that strives to mark out Fancy’s unique history. See Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927); John Bullitt and W. Jackson Bate, “Distinctions between Fancy and Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Criticism,” Modern Language Notes 60.1 (January 1945), 8–15; Earl Wasserman, “Another Eighteenth-Century Distinction Between Fancy and Imagination,” Modern Language Notes 64.1 (January 1949), 23–25; George G. Watson, “Contributions to a Dictionary of Critical Terms: Imagination and Fancy,” in Essays in Criticism 3.2 (1953), 201–214. Any serious attempts to tease Fancy apart from Imagination in literary history, however, cease after Abrams’ mid-century publications.
- 14.
For several reasons, this study focuses on Fancy in an English context. Perhaps the simplest is that it gives useful parameters for my exploration, especially since this book encompasses such a long time frame. But there are other, more compelling answers to the question, Why England? For one, this book explores how the unique English political and cultural context helped shape various iterations of Fancy, when, for instance, they register shifts in the notion of sovereignty tied to the political and religious upheavals in England of these centuries. Finally, as I suggest above, we already know the story of the Romanticist Imagination as it is shaped by a European context, especially by the work of German philosophers like Kant and Schilling. The story we have yet to hear involves Coleridge and other Romantics responding to the way Fancy had been used in England over the previous centuries.
- 15.
All the Works of Iohn Taylor the Water-Poet Being Sixty and Three in Number (London: I[ohn] B[eale], et al., 1630), 4.
- 16.
Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray, ed. Sharon M. Harris. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 4–5, original emphasis.
- 17.
The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Containing the Old and New Testaments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), Ecclesiastes 1:9.
- 18.
Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray, 5.
- 19.
For instance, Jeffrey Robinson also points out the degree to which Fancy is aligned with women. “The social marginalization of women and women’s consciousness,” Robinson writes, “[…] would make the Fancy seem a more natural poetics for women themselves, with its mission to make visible and include that which was not seen or heard for itself, but also with the playful habit of the fanciful mind coming from the culturally less ‘serious’ position of women’s thinking.” See Unfettering Poetry, 16.
- 20.
Paula Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 6.2 (1998), p. 253. Findlen particularizes for the seventeenth century the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s important but more general thesis that, as a culture becomes more organized and serious—such as western society in modernity—it becomes farther and farther removed from its foundation, originally built upon and permeated by play. See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
- 21.
Building on the work of historians of science like Peter Dear and William Newman, Mary Crane draws attention to the overemphasis in literary criticism on the characterization of natural philosophers like Francis Bacon and his mid-century heirs in the Royal Society as iconoclastic originators of a new science. As Crane writes, “When seventeenth-century natural philosophers accused their predecessors of basing their conceptions of nature on the authority of Aristotle rather than on observation of nature itself, they were exaggerating the situation for polemical reasons” (12). Long before Bacon, sixteenth-century writers were expressing anxiety and exhilaration about the “loss of an intuitive connection with nature” (5). Thus, this split was ongoing long before Bacon sounded the alarm, but he does both offer a particularly compelling expression of it and is largely responsible for popularizing (if not inventing in the first place) this loss, a loss that requires a rigorous, studious response with no room for play. Because he was so central to popularizing this view in the early seventeenth century and to the establishment of the Royal Society in the mid-century, I focus on him in these pages. That being said, the work of Mary Crane, along with these historians of science, is incredibly valuable for providing a corrective to this ubiquitous view that too readily takes Bacon and his heirs at their word. Mary Thomas Crane, Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
- 22.
Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent,” 250.
- 23.
Indeed, even by the mid-century, cultural perception of the figure of the “gentleman scientist” was still in flux, and the Royal Society regularly received accusations of being silly or ridiculous. I return to the Royal Society’s self-image in Chapter 4.
- 24.
Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, eds. James Spedding et al. (London: Longman, 1857–1874), 4: 53–55.
- 25.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 4: 32, my italics.
- 26.
Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent,” 254.
- 27.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 4: 30.
- 28.
Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent,” 258.
- 29.
Johannes Kepler, The Six-Cornered Snowflake, ed. and trans. Colin Hardie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 33. Partially quoted in Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent,” 264.
- 30.
Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent,” 264–265.
- 31.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 4: 28.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Findlen, “Between Carnival and Lent,” 263–264.
- 34.
See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Katherine Park, The Imagination in Renaissance Psychology, M.Phil. thesis (University of London, 1974). Katherine Park’s groundbreaking work demonstrates how, as the complex schemas of the mind prevalent in earlier centuries become streamlined in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth, the imagination takes on a higher profile within them. Building on her research, Clark offers a wonderfully thorough history of the many fears of the imagination’s deceptions and diseases that came with this prominence. Since “the workings of the early modern imaginatio were conceived of primarily as visual processes” (46), Clark situates the imagination within the complex visual culture of early modern Europe, in which—as this book also attests—seeing was never a straightforward act.
- 35.
Important recent work by critics such as John Lyons, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Gail Kern Paster, Michael Shoenfeldt, and Garrett Sullivan, explicate the centrality of the “embodied mind,” shaped by Galenic humoralism, to early modern culture. See Lyons, Before Imagination; Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) and Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakepsearean Stage (University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michael Shoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Garrett Sullivan, Sleep, Romance, and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (eds.), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2007). For the embodied mind in the eighteenth century, see Dennis Todd’s exploration of the “corporealizing imagination,” in Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
- 36.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Corrected, Enlarged, and with Sundry New Discourses Augmented (London, 1604), 52.
- 37.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, 1621), 123–124. For studies of the multitude of ways the Imagination was denigrated and pathologized in the early modern period, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye; William Rossky, “Imagination in the Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic,” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958), 49–73; and Suparna Roychoudhury, “Melancholy, Ecstasy, Phantasma: The Pathologies of Macbeth,” Modern Philology 111.2 (2013), 205–230.
- 38.
Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 61–62.
- 39.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 4: 32.
- 40.
Burton describes how the melancholic “suspects every thing hee heares or sees a diuell, and imagineth to himselfe a thousand Chimeras & visions” because his “corrupt phantasie makes [him] see and heare that which indeed is neither heard nor seene.” The imagination “rageth in melancholy persons in keeping the species of obiects so long, mistaking, amplifying them by continuall and strong meditation, vntill at the length it produceth reall effects” (Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 122).
- 41.
Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy in Sidney’s “The Defense of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (New York: Penguin, 2004), 11.
- 42.
Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, 11, 8.
- 43.
Guillory, Poetic Authority, 11.
- 44.
Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, 3: 343.
- 45.
Guillory, Poetic Authority, 14.
- 46.
Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, 8.
- 47.
See, for instance, Murray’s “Editor’s introduction” to J.M. Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas, ed. Penelope Murray (New York: Routledge, 1991), ix; and Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 59.
- 48.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Arden Shakespeare: Second Series, 1979), 5.1.8.
- 49.
While “comprehend” comes from the Latin com (from cum, with) + prehendere (to lay hold of, seize), suggesting the immediacy of the seizure, “apprehend” comes from ad (to, toward) + prehendere, suggesting more distance from the seizure.
- 50.
William D’Avenant, A Discourse Upon Gondibert an Heroick Poem/Written by Sr. William D’Avenant; with an Answer to It, by Mr. Hobbs (Paris: Chez Matthieu Guillemot…, 1650), 132. Hereafter referred to as Answer to Davenant’s Preface.
- 51.
Glanvill, Joseph, Plus Ultra, or, The Progress and Advancement of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle (London: James Collins, 1668), 89–90. Partially quoted in Findlen, “Carnival and Lent,” 264.
- 52.
Gray, “The Progress of Poesy,” lines 107–110.
- 53.
Seward, “Ode to Poetic Fancy,” lines 295, 5, 7–8.
- 54.
Anna Seward, Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years of 1784 and 1807, Volume 4 (A. Constable, 1811), 159.
- 55.
See especially Katherine Binhammer, et al., “Introduction: Feminist Literary Historiography” and Betty Schellenberg, “Beyond Feminist Literary History?: Re-historicizing the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Woman Writer,” in Women and Literary History: “For There She Was”, eds. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003); and Betty Schellenberg, “Writing Eighteenth-Century Women’s Literary History, 1986–2006,” Literature Compass 4.6 (2007), 1538–1560.
- 56.
Binhammer, et al., “Introduction,” 10; Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, New Revised Ed. (London: Virago Press, 1978).
- 57.
Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, 11.
- 58.
Schellenberg, “Writing Eighteenth-Century Women’s Literary History,” 1541; Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 125; Todd also quoted in Schellenberg, “Beyond Feminist Literary History?,” 79.
- 59.
Schellenberg, “Beyond Feminist Literary History?,” 74, 76.
- 60.
Margaret J.M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 13.
- 61.
Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 5.
- 62.
Schellenberg, “Writing Eighteenth-Century Women’s Literary History,” 1548, 1541.
- 63.
Molly Hite, “‘Except thou ravish mee’: Penetrations into the Life of the Feminine Mind, ” in Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Green and Coppélia Kahn (London: Routledge, 1993), 125; also quoted in Bonnie Kime Scott, “Beyond (?) Feminist Recuperative Study,” in Women and Literary History, eds. Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood, 222. As Katherine Binhammer, et al., assert in their introduction to Women and Literary History—a collection that is itself representative of this trend—the field of women’s literary history has come to be defined by its “diversity, breadth, and complexity” that encompasses a wide array of approaches from the “study of gender, of genres, of the conditions of women’s lives, of representations of women, of the inflections of race, class, and gender, sexual preference, or reception history, or of interrelations with writing by men” (14).
- 64.
Surely one of the largest scale attempts so far has been Palgrave MacMillan’s History of British Women’s Writing multivolume series, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, which covers women’s writing from 700 to the present day and addresses the range of critical approaches scholars have used to analyze this material; the first to be published was Volume 4, The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–1750, edited by Ros Ballaster, in 2010. But there are many other excellent and more period-specific examples. See Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2005), Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Jennie Batchelor’s recent essay “‘Connections, which are of service…in a more advanced age’: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30.2 (Fall 2011), 245–267.
- 65.
Agency is precisely what Jennie Batchelor, for example, extends to the amateur writers of The Lady’s Magazine and, in her Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (2010), to women writers as economic participants and professional authors who understand their writing as a kind of labor not unlike domestic work. And it is what Paula Backscheider grants those women writers when they make clear “statements of self-definition” about their participation in the public sphere of poetry. See Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 16.
- 66.
Schellenberg, “Beyond Feminist Literary History,” 86.
- 67.
Backscheider, Eighteenth Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, 22, 23.
- 68.
See Siskin’s chapter of that title in The Work of Writing. See also Paula McDowell, “Consuming Women: The Life of the ‘Literary Lady’ as Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England,” Genre 26 (1993), 219–252; and Betty Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 162–180.
- 69.
Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, 24.
- 70.
I owe thanks to Raphael Falco for inspiring this formulation.
- 71.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Revised Student Edition, Ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51; Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3, Eds. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 36.
- 72.
My thanks to Michael Lamb for an illuminating conversation about hope and Fancy’s fundamental affiliation. Jeffrey Robinson makes a similar point when he addresses Fancy’s “cheerfulness”: “One must remember that cheerfulness, like the Fancy, and like fantasy itself, has as much “reality” as a legitimate product of mind as the more privileged melancholy: for poetry “comedy” is as real legitimate a vision of life as “tragedy.” Robinson, Unfettering Fancy, 85.
- 73.
Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray, ed. Sharon M. Harris, 5.
- 74.
Silvan Tompkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, vol. 3 (New York: Springer, 1963), 433–434; also quoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 13.
- 75.
In Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), Sianne Ngai demonstrates just how central these three titular minor, quickly dashed-off aesthetic judgments are to understanding our postmodern world.
- 76.
Schellenberg, “Writing Eighteenth-Century Women’s Literary History,” 1555.
Bibliography
Engell, James. The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
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Smyth, M. (2017). Introduction: Fancy—The Untold Story of an Aesthetic Rogue. In: Women Writing Fancy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49427-2_1
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