{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.015261627906976744, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0007267441860465116, 'mean_word_length': 5.5260663507109005, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Archaeologies of Perception: Reading Wordsworth after Foucault

This essay traces an epistemic shift occurring jointly in the late eighteenth‐century sciences of sensation and in the literary aesthetics of early Romanticism. Taking as my point of departure Michel Foucault’s remark that the history of modernity begins with a conception of the human being as a mutable physiological entity, my essay examines some ways in which Wordsworth’s poetry registers this coeval emergence. I argue that the poet’s celebrated account of the “infant babe” in Book 2 of The Prelude reflects a newly understood conception of the sensorium as subject to historical change. Attending to the human‐scientific contexts of Wordsworth’s narrative, I make a further case for reading in this passage an historiographical investment in the senses and their periodization that connects such densely psychologized passages of the poem with its explicit critique of French sensationalist psychology in the same book. As I argue, Wordsworth’s seemingly hermetic reflection on the infant babe can be seen as a purposeful reflection on the task of representing the periods of human perception. Such passages of Wordsworth’s poetry thus represent an important anticipation of our own efforts to produce archaeologies of perception or to trace transformations of literary‐aesthetic sensibilities over time.