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1 results

  • Chapter 7 - Only Connect

  • from Part II - Psyche and Soma
  • Edited by Clark Lawlor, Northumbria University, Newcastle, Andrew Mangham, University of Reading
  • Book:
    Literature and Medicine
    Published online:
    03 June 2021
    Print publication:
    24 June 2021, pp 161-186

  • Summary

    Although we tend to separate aesthetics from medicine, Romantic culture was deeply invested in the nerves, and in the value of pleasure. Building upon the work of George Rousseau and others, this essay examines the history of medicine and of literature’s shared probing of pleasure and the nerves, using illustrative examples from Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Smith, and Tighe. These connections crop up where we might least expect them, and, hence, I analyze the commonplace book of dermatologist Thomas Bateman and consider how his fascination with the nerves as the organs of pleasure sheds potential light on his copying out of several of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets. My goal is to make it impossible to separate Romantic literature from its nervous body.