Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Budge, Gavin

Titel

Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789-1852

Auflage

2013

Ort / Verlag

London: Palgrave Macmillan

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 01 02 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 interrelationship between nervous strain, hallucination and vision. 02 02 This fascinating interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between literary interest in visionary kinds of experience and medical ideas about hallucination and the nerves in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on canonical Romantic authors, the work of women writers influenced by Romanticism, and visual culture. 31 02 This fascinating interdisciplinary study explores the influence of medical thought across a range of Romantic authors and genres, and links it to the Romantic preoccupation with visionary experiences 04 02 Acknowledgements 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 Bibliography Index 19 02 Topical - increasing interest in the interaction between science and literature, in the mainstream as well as academia Covers the 'long nineteenth century', rather than traditional 'Romantic' period - broader appeal Original argument - that Romantic poets reflect the influence of late 18th-century medical thought rather than German ideality philosophy, as is usually argued Combines work on canonical Romantic authors with non-canonical women writers 13 02 GAVIN BUDGE is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. He is the author of Charlotte M Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Lang 2007), and editor of a collection of essays, Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense.