Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square

In the Romantic era, encounters with the sublime, particularly in nature, produce what Romantic writers describe as moments of transport, of radical self-transcendence through which the ordinary boundaries of individual selfhood dissolve into something larger. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) argues that the sublime produces “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” and that, in Bethelmy and Corraliza’s words, it is triggered by “the experience of subjugation to something greater than oneself” (Burke 14; Bethelmy and Corraliza 2). Contemporary neuroscience confirms what Romantic poets and philosophers intuited: in states of awe, the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) quiets. It is in this egoless state that the self can genuinely be restructured, that the other can be authentically encountered, and that new stories about human nature and our relationship to the world become possible. This paper explores Romantic literary accounts of transport alongside current neuroscientific research on DMN suppression, neuroplasticity, and what Deleuzian philosophy describes as the fold: the structure by which consciousness emerges when matter curves back on itself to perceive itself. William Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Mariner blessing the water snakes “unaware,” and Percy Shelley’s Cloud proclaiming “I change, but I cannot die,” for example, describe the experience of the fold opening, the self momentarily recognizing its continuity with the larger fabric from which it is folded. Contemporary research on psilocybin and DMN suppression supports this (subjects consistently report experiences of recursive folding and boundary dissolution that closely parallel Romantic accounts of transport, suggesting that awe-states and psychedelic states may access similar underlying structures of consciousness, structures in which the ordinary ego is revealed to be a construction). Notably, while Mary Shelley’s male contemporaries often depict transport as a temporary experience from which the self returns enlarged to its ordinary boundaries, she is more interested in what happens when ego-dissolution is sustained. In her final novel Falkner (1837), Mary Shelley grounds the Romantic transport tradition in transmigration philosophy, drawing on Pythagorean metempsychosis, Paracelsian alchemy, and Lucretian atomism. The young, orphaned Elizabeth Raby’s daily graveyard communion with her dead mother (Mary Shelley herself would visit her feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave religiously) enacts her recognition that death is not annihilation but transformation, consciousness redistributing through the natural world. This paper argues that Mary Shelley’s understanding of transmigration offers an important model for contemporary climate crisis response, enabling us to feel beyond the isolated self, to empathize across species boundaries, and to recognize that we are always already part of the natural world we are destroying.

Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square is an Assistant Professor in Literature, the Environment, and Climate Change at Mount Allison University. She has published articles on the imagination, empathy, and emotional contagion and co-authored a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Health and Media (2022), “Climate Health Is Human Health: Working Through Eco-Anxiety with the Written Word in Print and Digital Media.” She has two forthcoming book chapters, “Emerging matter from the grave returns”: Transmigration of the Soul in Mary Shelley’s Falkner,” to be published in the Routledge Companion to Mary Shelley, edited by Michelle Faubert, and “Kindling Connections: How Diverse Neural Networks Enhance Empathy and Creativity in Higher Education,” to be published in Hope Circuits 3.0: Conversations with Luminaries. Dr. Jones Square's current research examines how literature intersects with ecology, neuroscience, and psychology, particularly focusing on representations of consciousness and neurodiversity in texts and exploring connections between literary works and climate activism.