British Romanticism as a Cognitive Category

How does canonical Romanticism constitute its "others," and to what extent has the category "British Romanticism" resisted wholesale incorporation of these "others," even in a period of widespread canon revision? In pursuing these questions, I find myself in fundamental agreement with Laura Mandell, who analyzes the resistance of British Romanticism to fundamental change in her recent essay "Canons Die Hard," remarking in passing on the "unconscious" kind of canonizing that goes on in the heads both of anthologists and of the classroom teachers for whom they anthologize. However, I wish to pursue the notion of an "unconscious" sort of canonizing in a quite different manner, drawing on the growing body of research that seeks to elucidate our largely nonconscious repertoire of scripts and models, concepts and categories. Discussions of how British Romanticism has conventionally been defined and delimited have made surprisingly little use of the large body of research and theory on categorization and cognition that has appeared over the past twenty-five years, and yet a cognitive approach may have much to tell us about the endurance of canonical British Romanticism and the manner in which canon revision—at least in relation to this field—has tended to proceed. Cognitive categorization theory departs decisively from the classical notion of firmly bounded categories based on necessary and sufficient criteria, as well as from the structuralist variation of the classical approach that emphasizes binary oppositions within a self-contained semiotic system. The cognitive approach builds instead upon Wittgenstein's notion of "family resemblance" categories, predicated not on universally shared criteria but instead on a "complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing," allowing for category members that may have no elements in common but that each overlap with certain other "examples." Wittgenstein displaces the all or nothing demand of the classical approach with a tolerance for fuzzy boundaries or, as he puts it in Philosophical Investigations, "blurred edges." Cognitive theorists like Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff seek in addition to account for the predominantly "automatic and unconscious" human tendency to base categories on "prototypical examples" or "cognitive reference points," such that (in contradistinction to the classical view) some members of a category will strike category users as "better" examples than others. This tendency has been replicated using artificial neural network learning programs and has been empirically demonstrated in human subjects many times and across numerous cultures (though the categories themselves, as opposed to the mode of categorization, remain culture-specific). English speakers in the U.S. will consistently choose a robin as a "better" or more prototypical example of a bird than, say, a vulture or a turkey (not to mention a penguin); a chair or table will reliably seem a better example of the category "furniture" than a chest or a lamp. A Wittgensteinian "family resemblance" approach to the category "British Romanticism" resolves a number of the seeming dilemmas that have plagued attempts to define Romanticism over the years. It allows us to see Romanticism in terms of shared features which are distributed unevenly over the field, rather than necessary conditions that must be present in a given work or author. Blake and Keats need not have a great deal, or much of anything, in common—so long as the writings of each manifests generic or stylistic or thematic features that significantly overlap with other writers in the category. (My youngest sister may not look at all like my older brother, but if they both, in their different ways, take after my mother, the "family resemblance" holds). We could readily list a number of such features conventionally associated with British Romanticism (drawing freely on attempts, such …