Fancy & Imagination

The Critical Idiom

by R.L. Brett

First published in 1969, this book provides a concise and helpful introduction to the terms ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’. Although they are generally associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the work begins with a discussion the history of these concepts which were also known to Aristotle, the Elizabethans, Hobbes, Locke and Blake. It then goes on to examine Coleridge’s theory of imagination and the distinction he drew between fancy and imagination. This work will be of particular interest to those studying Coleridge and the Romantic Movement.

72 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1969

Reviews

[Pooya Kiani · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتاب مهمِ گره‌گشای متوسط کهنه‌ایه، که برای مخاطب امروز ایرانی هنوز تازه‌ست.
ترجمه قابل قبوله و متن قابل فهم.
برای بهتر فهمیدن افلاطون، هابز و ایده‌آلیسم آلمانی، در مباحث هنری، می‌تونه کمک‌کننده باشه.

نشر مرکز - تخیل

[Adam Carnehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slim but helpful introduction to the conception of the imagination in English literature, "Fancy & Imagination" is part of The Critical Idiom series, a 1960s and 1970s collection of introductions to various literary forms and features, written for students. Other volumes include "The Absurd," "Tragedy," and "The Conceit."

This volume begins with the English Cambridge Platonists and ends with Shelley, demonstrating how the most significant theoretician of the imaginative faculty - Coleridge - owed much to the former and exerted considerable influence on the latter, as well as all subsequent poets, philosophers, and theologians who have attempted a definition of imagination and its relation to metaphysics.

R. L. Brett covers a great number of issues and thinkers in a short introduction. I'm especially grateful for his insights into the Platonist underpinnings of much metaphysical poetry before Coleridge which influenced his views on the creative imagination just as much (if not more!) than the German Idealists Kant and Schelling. For Coleridge, as for the Cambridge Platonists, the imagination was man's power to come to terms with reality via the symbol; imagination, the representation and creative expression of forms, allowed concrete expression of supra-sensible realities. It was a poetic vehicle to arrive at truth.

Many contemporary philosophers and theologians who write on the imagination still owe so very much to Coleridge, as well as to those 18th century Platonists who translated Plato's theory of εἰκασία or, perhaps more accurately, φαντασίαι - the ability of the human to receive divine truth via symbols communicated to his mind during moments of ecstasy and dream - to English literature and therefore, to the cultural mainstream during the Enlightenment.