“Set His Image in Motion:” John Dennis and Early Eighteenth-Century Motion Imagery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines early eighteenth-century attempts to explain how poetic descriptions of physical motion generated vivid scenes in the imagination. Motion was central to neo-Augustan theories of representation because, for much of this period, writers understood motion as a central principle of human nature. Questions about the mind/soul's “agitations” were crucial to a wide range of Enlightenment theories about mental imagery, rhetorical persuasion, and aesthetic beauty. Many writers, including John Dennis, linked the aesthetic import of spatial movement to Newtonian laws of motion. I trace the ways that Dennis's theories about motion imagery address not only the classical tradition of “bringing-before-the-eyes,” but also the modern philosophical models of inertia and force. In arguing that writing about poetry could better elucidate the motions of the mind/soul than could moral philosophy or physics, Dennis's essays can also teach us about eighteenth-century proto-disciplinary organization. Recent work in cognitive cultural studies has shown that the concept of motion is of vital importance to understanding the way the brain comprehends and structures language. This has especially wide-reaching implications for scholars of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature because it was during this period that writers began to codify connections between universal laws of nature, beauty, and human cognition.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".