Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

This chapter explores the intersections of the aural and the tactile in Romantic poetry. To trace the emergence of form within organic and inorganic matter, Romantic poetry draws on the anatomical and musical concept of formant, a material structure that shapes sound into melody within musical instruments and within the organs of hearing and phonation. The anatomists who explored the inner ear discovered a form of internal landscape, with crags and crevices, akin to geological formations. This prompted Erasmus Darwin and William Wordsworth to meditate on the aural potentialities of inorganic matter: the mineral at the origins of sensation and the phonic richness of matter. Percy Shelley also attends to the vibrancy of matter aspiring towards form when he muses on sculpture: honing the stone but also the senses of the artist, sculpture orients the senses towards the invisible and the potential, awakening the aspiration for freedom.

As late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scientific advancements generated new modes of comprehending life and matter, they also expanded the modalities of sensation, and generated new representations of the senses and of the act of sensing. Touch joined sight as a predominant source of analogies for scientific investigation. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the proliferation of modes of scientific imaging based on transferring the object of observation onto a material subjectile: from anatomical casts to the study of fossil imprints, modes of apprehension involving direct transfer ‘from matter to matter’ flourished, endowing direct contact with a paradigmatic role. What happens, then, to Romantic vision when touch reasserts itself? The creative interactions between touch and sight raises with renewed acuity the question of the modalities of figuration at the heart of Romantic conceptions of imagination. Who or what is sensitive and affected? Who and what envisions?

The Romantic age is generally seen as fertile ground for vibrant synaesthesiæ, reconciliations of the senses, when, for instance, one is invited to feel the texture of an object by merely looking at it: sight endowed with the power to touch at a distance. This chapter explores the opposite, uncomfortable experience of the eye forced into direct contact, when touch invades the eye and neutralizes sight, in order for poetic vision to emerge. It is an invitation to explore the other side of synaesthesia in the works of a late Romantic and fervent reader of earlier Romantic poetry: Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey’s attempts at healing the disconnection between sight and touch aims at imaginatively turning the eye into a sensitive surface. De Quincey’s aesthetics of development, in the photographic sense, opens up new sensory experiments into the relationship between sight and touch.

The last chapter brings the volume full circle as it looks into the ultimate confines of perception, across the limits of death. Contrasting with the Christian sacralization of the last breath, physiological research at the time revealed various stages in death, when vital organs fail one after the other, raising the troubling possibility of sensory remanence running through nervous fibres as the body gradually dies. These specters of sensations were invested by the Romantic imagination. This chapter investigates paradoxical imaginings of sensation after death in Keats’s Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, Percy Shelley’s ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which registers the dawn of sensation in a creature composed of tissues taken from the charnel-house, learning to feel through dead flesh. Such sensory experiments offer imaginative answers to the paradoxical question: what do the dead see through closed eye, through empty orbits?

This chapter looks at poetic explorations into the visionary powers of nonhumans. It examines a series of sense experiments in the works of Erasmus Darwin, Percy Shelley, and John Clare. For these poets, there is more than meets the human eye, as creativity is not limited to humankind. They draw on scientific investigations into the sensory apparatuses of animals and on research about the metabolic process later termed ‘photosynthesis’, in which the whole surface of the vegetal body is sensitive to light. That sensitivity, in which the body is both all eye and all skin, is the most vital sense, the one that truly defines plant life in its uncanny vitality. In these imaginary experiments, by endeavouring to experience the world through nonhuman senses, the poet encounters multifarious sensory modalities, as well as strangely intense forms of vision.

This chapter discusses market literature from its emergence in the late 1940s in southern Nigeria to its contemporary versions, with a focus on Onitsha market literature, Tanzanian pamphlets, and Ghanaian market fiction. The essay shows that the concept of the “market” is essential to the genre: it is a commercial print literature made for quick trade among the common person on the street seeking self-growth and a lively literature pushing at the boundaries of acceptability, prompting change and promising sensation and transformation. The cases of Tanzania and Ghana urge a reconsideration of the genre’s defining features, particularly in terms of the tensions between commercialization and artistry, and didacticism and poetics. We see how an uncensored industry trained on novelty may by turns elicit tabloidesque stories and expose social abuses. In its wide variability, the genre registers the turbulent process of putting norms of many kinds under social pressure. Ghana market literature’s spectacular rise and fall mirrors that of Onitsha market literature to make plain how sociopolitical optimism encourages aesthetic adventuring while economic downturns reduce publishers’ and readers’ options to survivalist works.

Chapter 5 examines how certain conventions of the sentimental genre – like the tear and the man of feeling archetype – are taken up in the sensation fiction of Wilkie Collins. Focusing primarily on The Woman in White (1860), it suggests that Collins uses the tear as a staging point from which to mount an argument about the limits of materialism. With characters such as the infamous villain Count Fosco, he highlights the dangers involved in completely conflating emotion and physiology. With this in view, while it has become customary to see the sensation novel as a genre that addresses itself specifically to the nerves, The Woman in White pre-emptively warns its readers not to strip bodily responses of their potential for meaning.

This manifesto argues that education should incorporate philosophical exploration to help young people address existential questions and find meaning and purpose in their lives. The manifesto suggests that to understand the meaning of one’s life, one must consider personal existence and consciousness and the reality beyond the here and now. It proposes that education should provide a neutral forum for discussing these big questions, without bias towards any particular belief system, and incorporating both scientific and spiritual perspectives. By engaging in such philosophical discourse, young people can develop a clearer sense of self and purpose, fostering resilience, mental well-being and a commitment to values and moral behaviour. This can support them to survive and thrive through the opportunities and challenges of the future.

The human standpoint and what sets it apart from the standpoint of non-rational animals is discussed. Some distinctions are also drawn between “lower” and “higher" representations of objects in terms of how much they involve of the cognitive apparatus. Additionally, it is discussed briefly how the human standpoint contrasts with the God’s eye viewpoint of traditional metaphysics. This brings us to a distinctive framework for empirical cognition of objects, namely, space and time as human forms of intuition – rather than God’s absolute “sensoria,” as in Isaac Newton. The framework gives rise to the distinction between appearances and things in themselves that comes with Kant’s Copernican turn. However, what is to be defended in subsequent chapters is a special variety of direct realism in philosophy of perception, and, thus, a deflated version of the “transcendental” side of Kant’s position. Even within mere empirical realism, with transcendental idealism bracketed, space can be seen as a form of perceiving, in so far as perceptual content is organized in a space-like manner and mirrors the layout of a spatial, perceived scene.

Chapter 5 explores the stakes of touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing books. Writers connected bookish words with sensory language to conceptualize the process of mediation.

“Philosophers of the Cabal” inaugurates a line of inquiry devoted to the Volk (people). A powerful critic of Kantian anthropology, Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the “spirit of a people [Volksgeist]” is grounded in a common structure of sensibility or Sinnlichkeit. This shared sensibility derives in part from the notion of the sensus communis theorized by British empiricists in the early eighteenth century. After tracing the influence of British aesthetics on Herder, the chapter moves forward to consider E. B. Tylor, a towering figure of Victorian anthropology known for the evolutionary theories that displaced Herder’s diversitarian model. I show that Tylor actually retained key Herderian premises regarding collective sensation, which modernists like W. B. Yeats then incorporated into a primitivist style. Hence the communalist aesthetics running from Shaftesbury through Herder and Tylor leads ultimately to modernists who came of age during the fin-de-siècle.

“Eusynoptos” takes its title from the Aristotelian notion of εὐσύνοπτος: “easily taken in at a glance.” In the Politics, Aristotle maintains that the size of a city is strictly delimited by the number of citizens that can be visually comprehended at a glance. But what if a machine were to augment the sensory capacities of humans? Could a political entity then be expanded beyond its natural limits? Confronting these questions in his film theory, Walter Benjamin modernizes eusynoptos by showing how the movie camera records large masses of individuals in a manner impossible for the naked eye. Informed by Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, the coda examines the reception of Nazi propaganda films in the United States in order to develop a critical theory of collective spectatorship that promotes a rational politics, thereby pressing back on an irrationalist tradition in aesthetics leading from Schelling and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to fascism.

The main aim of a first consultation will concentrate on establishing a diagnosis. However, there are two other major aims: capturing the expectations of the patient and appreciating the impact of the complaints on daily life.

This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.