ABSTRACT
This chapter takes an altogether more relativistic stance inspired by Ludmilla Jordanova's demand that 'Scholars may usefully designate as science anything that came under the term in the past any attempt to apply modern evaluative criteria in order to separate past activities into genuine science and pseudo science is profoundly unhistorical'. It follows Jerome McGann's critical disengagement from a trans-historical faith in the 'Romantic Ideology', that 'uncritical absorption in romanticism's own self-representations', to approach the literary work as a network of interwoven discourses in which the universalizing ideology of the aesthetic is one thread amongst many. The chapter brackets both the history of mesmerism and the weighty question of Romantic aesthetics in order to address the broader issue of the relationship of the nervous body to voice and text in the Romantic period. It argues that the therapeutic prerogative linking poetry with mesmerism in Coleridge's terms should be taken literally as the source of parallel strategies.
