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The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Denise Gigante
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Abstract

The aesthetic definition of monstrosity underwent a change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from a concept of deformity to a notion of monstrosity as too much life. Scientific discourse between 1780 and 1830 was preoccupied with the idea of a living principle that could distinguish living matter from nonliving, and the physiologist John Hunter posited an even more speculative “principle of monstrosity” as an extension of the formative capacity. Such monstrosity did not remain on the level of theory but became the motivating force for a new kind of monster in the literature of the Romantic period. Keats's Lamia emerges here as the consummate Romantic monster—a vision of life conceived beyond the material fact of organization. Viewed in this light, Lamia, no mere narrative swerve from Keats's epic ambitions, is a brilliant if tragic response to the question of what it means to “[d]ie into life.”

Type
Cluster on Science in the Nineteenth Century
Information
PMLA , Volume 117 , Issue 3 , May 2002 , pp. 433 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2002

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