Electric and Magnetic Dreams in Romantic Europe. The debate about the representation of Nature in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries

From Mesmer's Animal Magnetism to Ampère's electrodynamics, this book attempts to shed light on the multiple ways through which electricity and magnetism became metaphors, explaining the universe and man's behavior in a wide range of Romantic theories framed between the changing frontiers of science, medicine, literature, poetry and art. This work seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Romantic visions challenged the mechanical representation of nature by means of elaborating a unified vision of knowledge, which reintegrated calculus, verses, paintings and scientific observations together with enthusiastic reflections on man and the diversity of natural world. In an age when academic disciplines were being created, Romantic natural philosophers dreamt of creating an utopian vision of science, which claimed the use of imagination, intuition and emotions as essential methodological tools to unravel nature's secret forces.