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Suspended Animation, Slow Time, and the Poetics of Trance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert Mitchell
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Abstract

Suspended animation emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century as part of the efforts of the newly founded Royal Humane Society to convince lay and medical readers that individuals who had apparently drowned might still be alive, albeit in states of “suspended animation” (a condition we would now likely describe as a coma). The term was quickly taken up by medical and literary authors, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Exploring these Romantic-era approaches to suspended animation can help us understand the reception and formal structures of creative literature, grasp the often counterintuitive links that Romantic-era authors established between “altered states” and “Romantic sobriety,” and articulate why poetry and other slow media remain important in our contemporary new-media landscape.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 107 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

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