Against Finality

Since the rise of scientific thinking in the seventeenth century the role of the imagination in literature has been a matter for debate. Is it an essential resource or a treacherous purveyor of illusions? In this lecture Professor Beer suggests that one result of this uncertainty has been to set up a divison (which continues to pervade literary enterprises) between imaginative flights on the one hand and the weighing of words on the other. His examples are drawn from a wide range of writers including Johnson Dickens Hopkins Woolf and Wordsworth.