Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994 - Literary Criticism - 181 pages

An intriguing scholarly investigation, not so much of the ways the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries articulated pain, but of the ways in which pain itself articulated the late eighteenth-century experience. Through analysis of novels, plays, and poems, the author explores the transition from sensibility as a sense of "selflessness" to Romanticism, which puts the self in the foreground as the mediating consciousness. His tightly focused discussion sets a starting point for further critical investigation of the subject.

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Contents

Imagining Pain
30
Politics and the Romantic Theatre
59
Intermezzo
92
Aesthetics and Anesthetics at the Revolution
120
Conclusion
146
Works Cited
165
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About the author (1994)

Steven Bruhm is Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English at The University of Western Ontario.

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