Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life

by Andrea K. Henderson

• ISBN13: 9780521884020
• ISBN10: 0521884020
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-21
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

In their pursuit of emotional extremes, writers of the Romantic period were fascinated by experiences of pain and misery, and explored the ability to derive pleasure, and produce creative energy, out of masochism and submission. These interests were closely connected to the failure of the industrial and democratic revolutions to fulfil their promise of increased economic and political power for everyone. Writers as different as Frances Burney, William Hazlitt, John Keats, and Lord Byron both challenged and came to terms with the injustices of modern life through their representations of submission. Andrea K. Henderson teases out these configurations and analyses the many ways ideas of mastery and subjection shaped Romantic artistic forms, from literature and art to architecture and garden design. This provocative and ambitious study ranges widely through early nineteenth-century culture to reveal the underlying power relations that shaped Romanticism.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Submitting to liberty	p. 1
Finance and flagellation	p. 44
From sadism to masochism in the novels of Frances Burney	p. 63
The aesthetics of passion: Joanna Baillie's defense of the picturesque in an age of sublimity	p. 125
Practicing politics in the comfort of home	p. 171
Mastery and melancholy in suburbia	p. 224
Conclusion: Languishing femmes fatales	p. 272
Bibliography	p. 276
Index	p. 289
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.