Romanticism, medicine and the natural supernatural : transcendent vision and bodily spectres, 1789-1852 / Gavin Budge.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Budge, Gavin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Romanticism--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Romanticism.

History.

Great Britain.

Romanticism--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Literature and medicine.

Human body in literature.

Supernatural in literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 295 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Summary:

Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural explores the relationship between the Romantic preoccupation with visionary kinds of experience and early nineteenth-century medical theories of hallucination and the nerves, placing it in the context of accounts of perception in philosophical empiricism. Starting with an examination of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic narrative, and the canonical Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the book goes on to examine the persistence of this medical topos of hallucination and the visionary in mid nineteenth-century writers influenced by Romanticism, such as Harriet Martineau and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book concludes with a discussion of how the pathological language employed in early debates about Pre-Raphaelite painting reflects this Romantic conception of the inter-relationship between nervous strain, hallucination and vision. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Radcliffe and the spectral scene of reading

Erasmus Darwin and Wordsworth's poetics

Indigestion and Coleridge's medical imagination

Irritability and the politics of Deerbrook

Slavery and mass society in Uncle Tom's cabin

The hallucination of the real: pre-Raphaelite vision, democracy and masculinity

Conclusion: nineteenth-century medicine and the genealogy of English studies.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780230238466

0230238467

OCLC:

768071559