The Romantic imagination rejected Enlightenment rationalism and embraced the subconscious

Evidence

Romanticism rejected the Enlightenment’s insistence on observable matter and rationalism, instead focusing on the subconscious, dreams, and a wild imagination. As Paul Goetsch explains, “The pre-Romantic and Romantic discourse on imagination and superstition emerged from the Enlightenment’s context of skepticism. Various writers criticized the high evaluation of reason and the predominance of scientific rationalism.” In Gothic horror, dreams often functioned as warnings, as in Zofloya, the Moor, when Victoria has a dream of the Moor shortly before he appears before her. In Dracula, dreams function as a space of the subconscious where the monster and his victims meet. In many examples from the literature, dreams are liminal spaces where the worlds of reality and fantasy collide. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 437

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding thesis that the Muslim monster was manufactured in the Western imagination — dreams here are the manufacturing machinery, a psychological container for projection. — connects to: Enlightenment reason systematically dismantles all forms of love, not just sexual love; Romantic metaphysics originated in magic and serves to veil reality; Modernist ambiguity stems from a romantic refusal of objective commitment — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 212 (+2 more)
• SEED: The ‘dream as liminal space where monster and victim meet’ gives a strong analytic frame for how the West met its projected Muslim monsters in fantasy before real contact.