Abstract
This chapter revisits the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads and related materials in order to (re)assess Wordsworth’s affective poetics in terms both of its own literary-historical moment and of our cognitive-neuroscientific one. Drawing upon research in psychology, narratology, and empirical aesthetics, the discussion elaborates the history and science behind a set of related hypotheses, recently proposed by Keith Oatley et al., concerning “the communication of emotion in art”: (1) “emotions often are unclear”; (2) “emotions inspire creative expression”; (3) “artistic expression should often take on the form of emotion [or] have the dynamic and thematic properties of an emotion”; and (4) “readers or spectators of art should readily perceive the emotion communicated.”
I am grateful to the editors of this volume and especially Richard Gravil for instructive commentary and indispensable corrections.
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Bruhn, M.J. (2017). “The History and Science of Feeling”: Wordsworth’s Affective Poetics, Then and Now. In: Wehrs, D., Blake, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_25
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