Abstract

"Romantic Number(s): A Brief Introduction"

The six essays in this volume offer a range of mediations prompted by the volume’s title. These essays explore older and newer logics of “matching” and “counting” and “measuring” (whether statistical, geometric, or otherwise un/calculable); they register as well an upsurge in interest in formal-language, neurocognitive and medial-historical approaches. These essays invite us to think “bodies,” “multitudes,” and “subjectivity” along different axes. They ask us to think about the (romantic) one, the (romantic) proper name, quantity, and quality; they invite us to reflect on the status of poetry and measure, about the work of the novel as totalization, about models of mind, about calculuses of populations and food. Ranging through Wordsworth, Scott, Malthus, Babbage, and Galt (among others), this volume points to new directions in romanticist thinking while reconstructing the complexity of romantic-period thought.