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  • © 2012

Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural

Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789-1852

Palgrave Macmillan

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-viii
  2. Introduction

    • Gavin Budge
    Pages 1-26
  3. Irritability and the Politics of Deerbrook

    • Gavin Budge
    Pages 118-146
  4. Back Matter

    Pages 206-295

About this book

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.

Reviews

“Literary critics and historians of medicine will learn much from Gavin Budge’s wide-ranging and erudite study, which argues that Romantic medicine influenced writers from Coleridge through Hazlitt to Martineau, Stowe through Carlyle to the Pre-Raphaelites. … I learned a good deal from this study.” (Richard C. Sha, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, December, 2015)

"Budge's provocative attention to the productive nature of illness is just one of the ways that this impressive monograph advances Romantic studies... What is most remarkable about this study is the impressive research that grounds it. Indeed, Budge demonstrates an immense wealth of learning in English and American nineteenth-century literature, the history of medicine and religion, and criticism from a range of perspectives about his topics... even when Budge gestures to familiar critical and literary territory, he offers fresh interpretations of his topic... Overall, Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural is a welcome addition to the growing body of Romantic criticism on medicine and nineteenth-century literature. By approaching bodily illness as a source of literary inspiration,

providing an enormously detailed literary, historical, and critical context for his readings, and expanding our notion of 'Romantic' to cover a wide range of years, Budge encourages his audience to reconsider the many ways that nineteenth-century writers

imagined their bodies in relation to the rapidly changing and increasingly authoritative medical views of them." Michelle Faubert, 1650-1850

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Hertfordshire, UK

    Gavin Budge

About the author

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.

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access