Romanticism, hypertextuality, and metavisual information theory (William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ada Lovelace Byron)

Given the fact that words necessarily constitute the building blocks of written texts, it is logical to connect scholarly readings of theories of poetics and textuality with contemporaneous models of language and cognitive function familiar to their authors. While a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to the philosophical and psychological models that influenced romantic era authors, very little of this attention has been directed specifically to the subject of the theories of linguistic function that these authors inherited and their relationship to underlying theories of mind. In this treatise, I examine dominant trends in linguistic, cognitive models of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, noting their strong reliance on Pythagorean, as opposed to strictly Platonic, philosophy. I argue that these early theories of language and cognition distinguished sharply between visual thinking---thoughts and ideas about which one can form a "mental image"---and metavisual thinking---thoughts and ideas with no visiospatial analogue. This distinction set the stage for divergent modes of understanding the nature of knowledge at the beginning of the romantic era. Our culture has tended to privilege visual forms of cognition. But I argue that the works of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Ada Lovelace Byron, the world's first computer programmer, are rooted in metavisual models of linguistic, cognitive function. I further argue that the work of these figures continues to exert a metavisual influence to the present day, particularly in the area of electronic text production and theory.