Abstract
My thesis attempts to broach British romanticism from the perspective of its enlightenment inheritance, in particular, empiricist epistemology, psychology and its rhetoric. In this, I examine the transformation of sense and reason carried out by the empiricist tradition, that is, the practical and moral implications of seeing and knowing as an intertwined, determinant process.
I aim to show how the romantics subsequently adopt and modify these implications, to forge a relational dynamic between subject and object.1 From this, a creative connection can be seen between the logic of sense conditions and the romantic imagination, which then generates its own transports and transumptions by way of polarity and flux. Polarity and flux, considered in this way, bridge the gap between meaning and object, if only momentarily.
By working in the aesthetic patterns and tropological dimensions of empiricism, writers like William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, attempt to recognise a prior unity in the particulars of experience and how this serves the interpretative task of understanding communication.