Reimagining the Romantic Imagination: Embodied, Proto‐Cognitive Psychologies in Joanna Baillie's Introductory Discourse and Orra

Abstract

In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes the primary imagination as a divinely inspired, supreme faculty of the mind -"a repetition in the finite of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I AM." This spiritually understood, disembodied, deistic interpretation of the brain's creative center has come to signify the Romantic dualist perspective of the imagination; however, contemporary research in the fields of Romanticism and Cultural Cognitive Studies suggests that there may be a considerable amount to learn from reconsidering Romantic era notions of an embodied psychology. In that spirit, this essay will seek a new paradigm for an embodied, Romantic imagination, considering it from the perspective of the Scottish playwright, poetess, and theorist, Joanna Baillie. Through careful analysis of the Introductory Discourse, her preface to the inaugural Series of Plays on the Passions (originally published in 1798), and Orra, her tragedy on the singular passion of fear, as well as through the use of cognitive literary theory, I will demonstrate how Joanna Baillie proto-cognitively envisions the imagination as a significant means through which the embodied mind relates to and understands the world.