Acknowledgements Preludium on Synchronicity Romantic Dynamics, or Towards a Physical Criticism Blake's Deep Ecology, or the Ethos of Otherness At the Limit of Physical Theory, or Physical Dynamics in Coleridge's Rime Blake's Vortex, or the Quantum Bridge in Milton Reconstructing Byronic Time, or Temporality and Memory in The Giaour The Rhythmic Universe, or Spatial Dynamics in Shelley's Poetics Methodic Sadism/Symbolic Misogyny Endnotes Works Cited Index
Romantic Dynamics creatively collides English poetry with a wide range of exotic concepts associated with the 'new physics' of relativity and quantum to uncover their shared concerns for indeterminacy, uncertainty, relativity, and complexity in a chaotic universe. This interdisciplinary work traces the elaboration of dynamical models of cosmos and consciousness in works by Blake, Byron, Coleridge, the Shelleys and Wordsworth, finding in those works an exploration of the interpenetration of psyche and phenomena. This model, the author argues, establishes a new metaphoric terrain liberated from the classical mechanics of Newtonian thought and more easily traversed with models articulated by Bohr, Einstein and Hawking.
Mark S. Lussier is Associate Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Arizona State University.