Romantic vacancy : the poetics of gender, affect, and radical speculation / Kate Singer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Singer, Kate, 1977- author.

Series:

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century.

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

English literature.

Sentimentalism in literature.

Senses and sensation in literature.

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (280 pages).

Place of Publication:

Albany, New York : SUNY Press, [2019]

Summary:

"Romantic Vacancy argues that, at the cult of sensibility's height, Romantic writers found alternative tropes of affect to express movement beyond sensation and the body. Grappling with sensibility's claims that sensation could be translated into ideas and emotions, poets of vacancy rewrote core empiricist philosophies that trapped women and men in sensitive bodies and, more detrimentally, in ideological narratives about emotional response that gendered subjects' bodies and minds. Kate Singer contends that affect's genesis occurs instead through a series of figurative responses and movements that loop together human and nonhuman movements of mind, body, and nature into a posthuman affect. This study discovers a new form of Romantic affect that is dynamically linguistic and material. It seeks to end the long tradition of holding women and men writers of the Romantic period as separate and largely unequal. It places women writers at the forefront of speculative thinking, repositions questions of gender at the vanguard of Romantic-era thought, revises how we have long thought of gender in the period, and rewrites our notions of Romantic affect. Finally, it answers pivotal questions facing both affect studies and Romanticism about interrelations among language, affect, and materiality. Readers will learn more about the deep history of how poetic language can help us move beyond binary gender and its limiting intellectual and affective ideologies" -- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Introduction: the poetics of vacancy

Charlotte Smith and the taste of aporia

Mary Robinson's intensities: sensation after oblivion

Reaping songs & ineffable tales: William Wordsworth's and Percy Shelley's singing women and the rave of affect

Felicia Hemans's ruined minds: cognitive overload and the soul of freedom

Maria Jane Jewsbury and the phantom feelings of the moving image.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438475295

1438475292