Out of Breath: Respiratory Aesthetics from Ruskin to Vernon Lee

Garratt, Peter

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

• 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
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1664687
• Contract Date: Jun 22, 2018