Reimagining the Romantic Imagination

Imagination, a defining concept for the field of British Romantic studies before falling into critical disrepute, has recently become the subject of important revisionary work by Romanticists and of unprecedented interest among researchers in the sciences of mind and brain. These parallel developments have given rise to new physiological, materialist, and cognitive understandings of imagination that significantly qualify – without displacing – earlier views of imagination that dwell (approvingly or otherwise) on its associations with the ideal and transcendent. This essay provides an overview of changing perspectives on imagination and goes on to offer one example of how Romantic theories and representations of imagination may be newly understood, taking Mary Wollstonecraft's complex treatment of imagination in Maria as its main example.