Ann Radcliffe and the Scientific Imaginary: Education, Observation, and Sensibility

This dissertation explores Ann Radcliffe's use of eighteenth-century sciences, and scientific practice within her novels, in a way that presents the relationship between science and the imagination as reciprocal and dialogic in her work. So much Ann Radcliffe scholarship has focused on her use of description and imagination---while ignoring her engagement with natural history and the sciences---that an exploration of these topics seems overdue. From the beginning, Ann Radcliffe's novels were linked with the so-called "terrorist novel writing" that enjoyed tremendous popularity at the turn of the nineteenth century; because of this, it is the supernatural and superstitious elements which have taken center stage, while little critical attention has been paid to the role that Radcliffe's work played in the greater culture of Enlightenment and Romantic literature. To focus on the Gothic elements of Radcliffe's central novels, without acknowledging her engagement with science and the scientific method that came about during the eighteenth century, would be to miss in part what made her work so relevant to her contemporaries, as well as authors who came after her, such as Mary Shelley.;Starting with the idea of the eighteenth-century novel as a part of a cultural system that linked science and fiction to create a type of scientific fiction, I examine the ways in which Radcliffe referred to, and contributed to, current conversations and conventions about empiricism, sensibility, and knowledge. Through her inclusion of contemporary scientific practice and debate within her novels, ranging from: botany and familiar sciences, to medicine and anatomy, to the pseudo-science of physiognomy, we can begin to see the ways that she both contributed to and questioned the greater landscape of science at the end of the eighteenth century.