ABSTRACT
In 1829, Thomas Carlyle announced the end of the Romantic period, and he traced its demise to the rise of the machine. Fundamental conceptions of identity were being revised as traditional metaphysics was abandoned, and in its place a Science of Mind emerged that allowed the mechanical metaphysician to lay open the moral structure with his dissecting-knives. Yet while Carlyle identified the research of Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis who argued that all mental processes had a physiological basis as a symptom of an age that walked through land of wonders, unwondering, recent interdisciplinary studies have reformulated the understanding of the Romantic period to reveal extensive interplay between Romantic literature and the materialist theories of mind that Carlyle saw as the flowering of the Age of Machinery. Franzen's argument with the sciences of mind is a productive one indeed, he have argued elsewhere that it is partly this argument that generates the form and much of the content of The Corrections.
