Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee

Garratt, Peter

Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee Thumbnail


Authors



Contributors

Arthur Rose
Editor

Abstract

This chapter examines the roles played by respiration—as physiological process, and embodied response—in the development of aesthetic theories at the end of the nineteenth century, traced from Ruskin to Vernon Lee. Late nineteenth-century attempts to define aesthetic experience in terms of its attendant physiological reactions still drew on breath’s immaterial poetic associations (air, wind and spirit) while being alert to the way respiratory control shifts easily between voluntary and involuntary modes of experience (will/automation). Lee’s idea of aesthetic experience envisages a complex, perhaps mystifying, action of involvement with works of art, dependent upon physiological, sensorimotor and respiratory movement. Exploring her understanding of empathetic identification, and relating it to current models of enactive cognition, the chapter recovers an entangled art and science of breath in nineteenth-century aesthetic theory.

Citation

Garratt, P. (2018). Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee. In A. Rose (Ed.), Reading breath in literature (65-90). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7_4

Acceptance Date Jun 22, 2018
Online Publication Date Oct 30, 2018
Publication Date Oct 30, 2018
Deposit Date Jun 22, 2018
Publicly Available Date Nov 12, 2019
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
Pages 65-90
Series Title Palgrave studies in literature, science and medicine.
Book Title Reading breath in literature.
ISBN 978-3-319-99947-0
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99948-7_4

Files

Published Book Chapter (549 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.





You might also like



Downloadable Citations