This essay examines the use of poetic quotations in the metascientific writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Herschel, and William Whewell. It situates particular uses of poetic quotations in relation both to the author’s work and the broader context of early nineteenth-century metascientific discourse. While each of these authors espoused a different model of scientific method, they all had recourse to poetic quotations as a means of gesturing toward what they saw as the fundamental unity of knowledge. In an age of increased disciplinary specialization, poetic quotations functioned as both ceremonial invocations of a unitary national culture and speculative gestures toward a future synthesis that would articulate the fragmentary branches of modern knowledge as a fully integrated organic whole.

The aim of this essay is two‐fold: first, to survey exemplary recent work on Romanticism and media studies; and second, to elucidate the key theoretical and methodological issues that arise from this work and hence might serve as coordinates for the future development of the field. The essay addresses the following issues central to both Romantic Literature and Media Studies: how to assign agency within complex techno‐human assemblages; how media studies affects questions of literary historical periodization, especially with regard to the transition between the Enlightenment and Romantic eras; how to account for the constitutive reflexivity of media studies as a discipline; and how the adoption of a media historical research program might help to re‐model the disciplinary boundaries of contemporary humanities scholarship.

No abstract