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In Romanticism and Pleasure, nine scholars discuss the aesthetics, culture, and science of pleasure in the Romantic period. The broad range of topics include the relationship between sexuality and eighteenth-century epistemologies of pleasure in Byron, the neuroscience of addicted pleasure in Coleridge, colonialism and the pleasures of controlled space in Mansfield Park, novel-reading and radical views of appetite and scarcity, the pleasures of disease and melancholy, and theories of pleasure in psychology and medicine. The book provides a timely addition to recent critical work on pleasure, taste, and appetite by scholars such as Richard Sha, Denise Gigante, and Anya Taylor.
Foreword Denise Gigante ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction Michelle Faubert Thomas H. Schmid 1
1 Byron, Polidori, and the Epistemology of Romantic Pleasure Richard C. Sha 17
2 Pleasure in an Age of Talkers: Keats's Material Sublime Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol 39
3 "Was it for this?": Romantic Psychiatry and the Addictive Pleasures of Moral Management Joel Faflak 61
4 John Ferriar's Psychology, James Hogg's Justified Sinner, and the Gay Science of Horror Writing Michelle Faubert 83
5 "It is a path I have prayed to follow": The Paradoxical Pleasures of Romantic Disease Clark Lawlor 109
6 "Taking a Trip into China": The Uneasy Pleasures of Colonialist Space in Mansfield Park Jeffrey Cass 133
7 Exhausted Appetites, Vitiated Tastes: Romanticism, Mass Culture, and the Pleasures of Consumption Samantha Webb 149
8 "Diminished Impressibility": Addiction, Neuroadaptation, and Pleasure in Coleridge Thomas H. Schmid 167
9 Nature, Ideology, and the Prohibition of Pleasure in Blake's "Garden of Love" Kevin Hutchings 187
Notes on Contributors 209
Index 213
Overview
In Romanticism and Pleasure, nine scholars discuss the aesthetics, culture, and science of pleasure in the Romantic period. The broad range of topics include the relationship between sexuality and eighteenth-century epistemologies of pleasure in Byron, the neuroscience of addicted pleasure in Coleridge, colonialism and the pleasures of controlled space in Mansfield Park, novel-reading and radical views of appetite and scarcity, the pleasures of disease and melancholy, and theories of pleasure in psychology and ...