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Science, Poetry, And Defining Life In The Romantic Era: “Life! What Is Life?”, Michelle E. Trantham

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

What defines humanity? Is it the soul? The body? In the early nineteenth century, these questions were not purely philosophical. Science, religion, politics, and literature were changing rapidly, and the question of “What is Life?” was central to the public and private pursuit of knowledge. One way to track the evolution of the question through the Romantic period is to look at the work of Dr. John Hunter, the originator of ‘vitalism’, which was the subject in the infamous the Lawrence-Abernethy debates. The question of life, and the nature of life, permeated the literary, scientific, and cultural spheres, influencing Romanticism …