Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling

Abstract

Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling Miranda Burgess (bio) Miranda Burgess University of British Columbia, Canada Miranda Burgess Miranda Burgess is Associate Professor of English at the Unviersity of British Columbia and the author of British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830. She is finishing Romantic Transport, 1790–1830, a book that examines the technologies and anxieties of mobility at the turn of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of feeling, the poetics of the figure, and experiments in narrative form. Her next project is a history of the idea that art moves those who encounter it. Footnotes I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support of the project to which this essay belongs. 1. Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) 3, 10. 2. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005) 4. Subsequently cited in the text. 3. Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999) 10, 193; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) 31–32, 658. 4. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 10. Subsequently cited in the text. 5. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978) 316. Subsequently cited in the text. 6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 13. Subsequently cited in the text. 7. For Hume 576, sympathetic feeling proceeds from visible signs to a deduction of causes to “such a lively idea of the passion as is presently converted into the passion itself.” 8. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, eds., Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). 9. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 191, 197, 207. Subsequently cited in the text. 10. De Man, “Metaphor (Second Discourse),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 151. Subsequently cited in the text. 11. See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002) 29–30. 12. Among the many rich and promising existing schemas for distinguishing between feelings and affects, this essay follows Brian Massumi’s development, in Parables 23–45, of a Spinozist model in which affects, as “intensities” existing as rich fields of potential, become feelings when they enter the related spheres of volition, cognition, experience, and language, which is also to say subjectivity. 13. “Transport” experienced a brief vogue in the late 1980s, perhaps in consequence of the psychologist Victor Nell’s Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), in which the term is repeatedly invoked to name the imaginative participation in scenes Nell theorizes as critical to readerly enjoyment. Karen Swann’s “Public Transport: Adventuring on Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain,” in ELH 55.4 (1988): 811, argues for the “creaks and jolts, shrills and iron clangs, [and]… insults… to one’s amour propre” that result from the experience of sympathy, or “transubjectivity,” Wordsworth depicts between Sailor and Female Vagrant, but these reminders of a material substrate for vagrant affect serve chiefly as a metonym for publicity (as in a public conveyance such as the stagecoach). David Marshall, in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 5, ascribes to several writers of the long eighteenth century, including Mary Shelley, “an investment in the concept of sympathy as a transport that would transcend the distance and difference between people, allowing an exchange between parts, characters, and persons,” but does not elaborate on the material conditions of such an exchange. More recently, “The Transport of the Novel,” the title of Deidre Lynch...

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