BRITISH AND ROMANTIC VICTOTRIAN CULTURES

SEXUALITY AND THE CULTURE OF SENSIBILITY IN THE BRITISH ROMANTIC ERA
Christopher C. Nagle
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From Palgrave Macmillan
Pub date: Nov 2007
240 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
$79.95 - Hardcover (1-4039-8435-2)


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Description
Drawing together theoretically informed literary history and the cultural history of sexuality, friendship, and affective relations, this is the first study to trace fully the influence of this notorious yet often undervalued cultural tradition on British Romanticism, a movement that both draws on and resists Sensibility’s excessive embodiments of non-normative pleasure. Offering a broad consideration of literary genres while balancing the contributions of both canonical and non-canonical male and female writers, this bold new study insists on the need to revise the traditional boundaries of literary periods and establishes unexpected influences on both Romantic and early Victorian culture and their shared pleasures of attachment.



Author Bio
Christopher C. Nagle is Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University, where he teaches courses in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature as well as critical theory and gender studies. His previous work has appeared in English Literary History, Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, and Comparative Drama.



Praise for Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era
“This is an ambitious study that argues for the continuance of Sensibility within Romanticism, ‘embedded’ within texts by writers who ostensibly rejected its excesses in favor of more directed models of psychological development, and seeking social cohesion in other modes. A strength of the study is, thus, one of range: not many studies move with equal surefootedness from Lawrence Sterne to Tennyson, and across genres from fiction to poetry.”--Peter Manning, SUNY-Stony Brook University



“This book opens the door to the Romantic closet at last. Besides dealing with issues of gender and sexuality as they have rarely been addressed, Nagle exposes romanticism's deep debt to the culture of sensibility and all the complexity of deep personal response that culture implies. This remarkable study deals with the major poets, women writers of both poetry and prose, and it demonstrates the ways in which Romantic writers are in active dialogue with predecessors of Sensibility. It opens the Romantic era to so much of the politics of pleasure that were seething within it all along.”--George E. Haggerty, University of California, Riverside



“This elegant study, with its creative synthesis of historicism, gender studies, and queer theory and its superlative close readings, provides exciting new analyses of classic works by Austen, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others. Arguing for a politics of pleasure that can be traced to the enduring influence of Sterne, Nagle offers a bold and stimulating assessment of the persistent role of sensibility through the Romantic period and well into the Victorian era. Nagle’s original juxtaposition of canonical and non-canonical works yields a study that convinces readers of overlooked connections and under-appreciated continuities. This book is bound to alter irrevocably our understanding of literary culture at the turn of the nineteenth century.”-- Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Boston College



Table of contents
The Pleasures of Proximity * ‘The Heart’s Best Blood’: Sterne and the Promiscuous Life of Sensibility * From Trembling to Tranquility: Women Writers and Wordsworth’s Pleasure Principle * Epistemologies of the Romantic Closet: Shakespeare, Sexuality, and the Myth of Genius * The Social Work of Persuasion: Austen and the New Sensorium * Prometheus vs. the Man of Feeling: Frankenstein, Sensibility, and the Uncertain Future of Romanticism (An Allegory for Literary History) * Sentimental Journeys: The Afterlife of Feeling in Landon and Tennyson


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