Romantic Embodiments: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability
Item
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Title
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Romantic Embodiments: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:e16481dc4405:12000
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identifier
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12664
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Creator
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Stanback, Emily B.,
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Contributor
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Alan Vardy
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Aesthetics | British Romanticism | Disability Studies | History of Medicine | History of Science
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Abstract
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Romantic Embodiments seeks to put the body back into conversations about Romantic aesthetics. For as long as there have been healers and doctors, there have been those thought to be under their purview---what we now call "the disabled." During the Romantic period, cultural attitudes about disability were productively diverse, as religious, rationalist, and (proto-) normative views of disability met and clashed in the popular imagination. Romantic Embodiments examines texts in a variety of different genres---epic and lyric poetry, essays, medical and scientific tracts, periodicals, letters, notebooks---to demonstrate two critical and interrelated levels on which authors of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle engage with the aesthetics of disability. The first is that of the non-normative body itself as a participant in aesthetically significant experiences. All of the texts in Romantic Embodiments reflect on what it means to encounter the disabled or to encounter the world as a disabled person, and specifically how disability impacts the aesthetic relations between the human body and the various bodies with which it comes into contact. The second level is a formal and conceptual one, as I examine moments at which texts embody such qualities as irrationality, inarticulacy, decay, disfigurement, fragmentation, and distortion at the level of the word, line, sentence, stanza, and genre. The relationship between disabled bodies and the textual qualities I discuss is not a necessary one, but I discuss characteristics that just as easily may be applied to the human body or work of art, and suggest connections between corporeal and artistic form.;Romantic Embodiments consists of three sections---Scientific Bodies, Bodies in Pain, and Embodied Encounters---and focuses on a specific network of authors and thinkers who were directly engaged with one another from the 1790s onwards: John Thelwall, Thomas Beddoes, Humphry Davy, Tom Wedgwood, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb. Because I take on a group of authors that collaborated and communicated extensively, I intend Romantic Embodiments to fill in a critical gap related to the ways that we understand the aesthetics of specific authors and specific texts. But much more so I intend this project to open up important avenues of inquiry into Romantic literature and culture writ large.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
