title: Toward a physiology of the romantic imagination.
abstract: If historicist studies have equated the Romantic imagination with ideology, this essay seeks to recover a physiological imagination. Such recovery will show that historicist studies of the imagination have not been historical enough. Even as physiology attempted to make a science out of the living as opposed to the dead, it turned to concepts like life, predisposition, and potentiality to give the imagination a curious immaterial materiality, one that made materiality a site of possibility rather than determinism.
authors.forename: Richard C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Sha
mesh_terms: D000883:Anthropology / Q000193:education / Q000266:history; D015984:Causality; D003643:Death; D004644:Emotions; D033141:Genetic Determinism; D049669:History, 16th Century; D049670:History, 17th Century; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D007092:Imagination; D019369:Life; D010827:Physiology / Q000193:education / Q000266:history