Overview
- Constitutes the first book-length examination of the Romantic interest in obsessive thinking
- Examines a wide variety of Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to John Keats
- Enlists a transatlantic, interdisciplinary range of Romantic-era texts - philosophical, medical, and literary - to argue that all of these discussions of obsession were influenced by the aesthetic discourse of the sublime
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (7 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Most of us have, at one time, been obsessed with something, but how did obsession become a mental illness? This book examines literary, medical, and philosophical texts to argue that what we call obsession became a disease in the Romantic era and reflects the era’s anxieties. Using a number of literary texts, some well-known (like Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 “The Tell Tale Heart”) and some not (like Charlotte Dacre’s 1811 The Passions and Charles Brockden Brown’s 1787 Edgar Huntly), the book looks at “vigilia”, an overly intense curiosity, “intellectual monomania”, an obsession with study, “nymphomania” and “erotomania”, gendered forms of desire, “revolutiana”, an obsession with sublime violence and military service, and “ideality,” an obsession with an idea. The coda argues that traces of these Romantic constructs can be seen in popular accounts of obsession today.
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Kathleen Béres Rogers is an Associate Professor of English at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Creating Romantic Obsession
Book Subtitle: Scorpions in the Mind
Authors: Kathleen Béres Rogers
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13988-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-13987-2Published: 09 April 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-13988-9Published: 29 March 2019
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 206
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Eighteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Poetry and Poetics