This essay revisits the relationship between Clare’s mental and physical health and his writings by considering the importance of taking him on his own terms. Appraising the critical history of diagnostic approaches towards Clare’s mental and physical distress, it suggests that such categoric approaches to the poet’s psychophysiological life are unsatisfactory. It turns instead to a key term that Clare used repeatedly to describe his varied forms of disorder – his ‘indisposition’ – and argues that it remains important to Clare and to us as readers of him because of its dislocating and indecisive potential. Considering his unsettled position within the medical and literary culture in which he lived, and broadening the range of his medical encounters and vocabulary beyond the narrow context of the asylum, the essay discuss Clare’s symptoms and his poetic representations of them as entangled with his mobility across, and unstable status within, different places, social worlds, and identities.

For the British, ‘Europe’ in general and continental Romanticism in particular approached an enigma. This chapter examines how British intellectuals and artists perceived and engaged with continental aspects of the literature, music, and visual arts in this period. It focuses on lesser-known examples, which includes the specificity of German Gothicism and De Quincey’s fictitious biographical essay The Last Days of Immanuel Kant, but also Thomas L. Peacock’s critiquing of this English preoccupation with German thought. This chapter asks whether, in aesthetic terms, British engagements with ‘Europe’ cannot but ‘romanticize’ the continent, thus maintaining a paradoxical attitude of ‘remote proximity’, which might also apply to subsequent eras.

This chapter investigates how Australian women poets mobilised Romantic sensibility and the figure of the poetess to navigate the complex dynamic between liminality and voice. It proposes a transnational extension of a female Romantic tradition to advocate for the rights of those disempowered in colonial and patriarchal structures. The chapter explores how writers like Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, and Caroline Leakey linked themes of exile and transportation with Romantic tropes such as the ‘fallen woman.’ It demonstrates how their poetry reveals an emotional range that extends the domestic affections into expressions of anger and distress at injustices. It also considers how religion informed their responses to regimes of regulation. The chapter also analyses Ada Cambridge’s critique of marriage in the suppressed volume Unspoken Thoughts, as well as her amplification of a broader gendering of harm and shame.

This chapter explores Wittgenstein’s two references to the arts in 4.014. The first is his musical example of the unity of language and the world; the second his allusion to the fairytale The Gold-Children by Brothers Grimm. The chapter argues, first, that Wittgenstein’s early notion of logic incorporates forms that for Kant belong to transcendental aesthetic, namely, space and time. Second, it spells out how this commitment motivates Wittgenstein’s musical example and why it is crucial to draw a distinction between transcendental form and empirical structures made possible by that form. Finally, the chapter argues, pace Peter Sullivan, that the unity of language and the world is guaranteed by the metaphysical subject as their common origin. If the fairytale is read as a condensed illustration of Wittgenstein’s position, then this common origin is signified by a golden fish.

I reconstruct the preliminary arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic, which provide the criteria of on which Kant’s central arguments will turn. Kant characterizes intuition as (i) object-giving, (ii) immediate, (iii) affection-dependent representation containing (iv) a matter of sensation that can be distinguished from (v) an a priori form. I explain Kant’s curiously teleological claim that all thought “aims at” intuition in terms of his “baseline conception” of intuition as providing nonintellectual grounds of truth: This is what it means for intuition to be object-giving. I then argue that Kant’s theory of discursive marks entails that object-giving representations must be immediate. Further, the intuition paired with a discursive intellect must be receptive (i.e. affection dependent). These claims can be justified via pure apperception. What cannot be is Kant’s characterization of intuition as sensible. But I show that Kant’s form/matter distinction and his subsequent arguments require only the receptivity of intuition, not its sensory embodiment. The chief doctrines of the Aesthetic can be justified via pure apperception, as part of a top-down approach to intuition.

I continue explicating my Stufenleiter by distinguishing receptivity from sensibility, which are often conflated in the literature. I argue that the preestablished harmony theories of Leibniz and Crusius, as well as the “hyperphysical influx” Kant ascribes to Plato, involve receptive but non-sensible modes of intuition. I identify significant and underappreciated puzzles afflicting Kant’s notion of sensible affection: Kant has no account of how material objects can affect an immaterial mind, nor any account of how an immaterial mind can sensibly affect itself. I conclude by observing that many of the distinctions I discuss, such as the receptivity/sensibility distinction, track different levels of abstraction and that this can have significant consequences for motivating interpretations. Emphasizing sensibility often motivates phenomenological interpretations (Parsons), whereas semantic or “logical” readings (Hintikka) typically emphasize receptivity. I illustrate the fruitfulness of this diagnosis by distinguishing three different conceptions of the singularity of intuition, each associated with a different level of abstraction: receptive, sensible, and human.

This chapter opens with an account of the Bank Restriction Act (1797) as marking a crisis in the British credit system on which the economy depended. It reads Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), as investigating the gendered systems of affect, belief, and credit which underwrote both political economy and social relations. Against Adam Smith’s attempt to regulate potentially disruptive forms of affect, including credulity and sensibility, the ‘extreme credulity’ of Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, rewrites the usual story of irrational femininity as the binary other to masculine rationality. Demonstrating the mutual imbrication of financial and sexual economies in late eighteenth-century commercial society, Wollstonecraft attempts to mobilise an alternative economy of social feeling to reform a selfish, sexualised world of commerce based on self-interest, and to reformulate the relations between morality and commercial society – between affect and money – by asking what else might circulate to social advantage.

This chapter probes the conceptual architecture of irritability in the eighteenth century. It justifies this case study not through a pre-established research agenda but because automated statistical comparisons reveal a marked transformation both in the term itself and in the broader network in which it is embedded. Irritability has long been marginalised in favour of its sister term, sensibility; yet we demonstrate the abiding significance of the former, in a variety of canonical works (Erasmus Darwin, Edmund Burke) and less familiar medical handbooks. This largely overlooked medical discourse infuses broader thinking on gender, colonialism and aesthetics; it worries the distinction between human and non-human life. We conclude by proving that the emergence of the irritability network holds significant consequences for other forms of conceptual thinking. In particular, we show how it affords a rethinking of the notion of habit, and facilitates the transformation of the cultural concept of system from a largely Newtonian and mechanistic notion, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to an increasingly dynamical and physiological entity.

The cultures of sensibility explored in Chapter Four authorised women to write, but as the chapter shows, the concept was equally influential among male writers, and contributed in significant ways to Romantic-period aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Eighteenth-century aesthetics reflected a new interest in the body and the senses. Like Romantic nature, Romantic sensibility is presented as a story of co-becoming, in this case between body and mind rather than between mind and nature. After discussing the difficulty of defining sensibility, the chapter provides a history of eighteenth-century neurophysiology, including the ground-breaking work of Haller, the electrical experiments of Galvani, and Bonnet’s invention of psychology. Steiner then turns to Rousseau to demonstrate the transition from medical to moral sensibility, and how sympathy operated as a central principle among Edinburgh’s moral sense philosophers. Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey helped spread moral sympathy across Europe, linking it with the feminisation of culture and with various reform movements, as shown in examples ranging from Chateaubriand to Jean Paul, a Danish anti-slavery narrative to the ‘Revolution debate’ in Britain. The chapter ends on an ambivalent note, using the Pygmalion motif to address the often-criticised connection between sensibility and narcissism.

The arias in Mozart’s The Magic Flute are some of the most vivid and enduring in the operatic repertoire. This chapter examines how poetic structures, musical and dramatic conventions, and the abilities of the singers who originated the roles shaped their creation. While many writers focus primarily on musical form when analyzing arias, this study reveals that other elements contribute as much or more to the aria’s expressivity and the dramaturgical role it plays. Analysis also demonstrates how each aria in this work contains something unusual or extravagant – a musical element or moment that stretches the customary practices of eighteenth-century music. This fact alongside the arias’ diversity of style, color, and affect suggests the composer took great care to make each one distinctive. Consequently, Mozart’s skill and creativity was and is on display. Thus, the arias make manifest one of the opera’s main themes: the power of music.

This chapter draws on conceptions of gender in Mozart’s time and ours to explore the opera’s representation of women. This aspect of The Magic Flute, including the misogynistic statements of the priests, is now widely regarded as problematic. The opera sets the rule of Sarastro and his brotherhood against the Queen and her entourage, and the focus on this conflict between the sexes has to some degree obscured the opera’s focus on the construction of gender in the characterization of Pamina and the Queen. Gender is performed on stage within an established context and frame of reference. Pamina is a sentimental heroine whose idealized image, abduction, and abandonment prove her moral virtue; the Queen is a dark and vengeful mother who refuses to accept her restricted position. This focus allows us to see how both mother and daughter complicate patriarchal assumptions by raising important questions about gender and power.

As soon as newspapers, catering to England’s new urbane peoples, began describing common executions, the crowds attending them were seen as indifferent to their moral message. By the middle of the eighteenth century, execution rituals seemed equally problematic. Critics perceived hangings to be so frequent, so large-scale and so brutalizing to an even minimally refined sensibility as to defeat their deterrent purpose. In 1783, London officials sought to redress these problems by devising a new execution ritual, staged immediately outside the prison and courthouse. Within four decades, this quintessentially urban execution ritual had been adopted in almost all other English counties, even as cities on the continent pointedly moved executions outside urban centres. Yet still executions seemed ineffective. Following a particularly intense crisis in the 1780s, England’s traditional ruling elites sought to preserve the “Bloody Code” by reducing the scale of hangings to historically low levels.

This chapter focuses on planters manuals beyond Saint-Domingue published by Jean Samuel Guisan and Jean-Baptiste Poyen de Sainte-Marie. Writing respectively in the very different circumstances of an underdeveloped French Guiana and an economically mature Guadeloupe, both writers urged planters to adopt technological innovations, regiment their workforce, keep detailed records, and prioritize long-term profitability over short-term profits. Publishing in close proximity to the French and Haitian Revolutions (1788 and 1792, respectively), they also had to consider increased anti-slavery sentiment, even revolutionary ferment, in expressing their pro-slavery views. They responded by promoting the ideal of an “enlightened” planter, which is contrasted to the ideas of the marquis de Casaux, published in a 1781 treatise. Appropriating the language of sentiment, Guisan and Poyen folded “humanity” into plantation management, asserting that this would harmonize with the planter’s self-interest and increase his happiness by promoting that of the enslaved. Ultimately, though, they construed the planter’s mastery differently: for Poyen, a benevolent plantation monarch ruled over his subjects while Guisan’s planter was accountable to a wider social and political order devoted to collective good.

Along with the third chapter, this chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is informed by the successes and failures of previous interpretations. Heidegger does not bring idiosyncratic concerns to Kant’s text, but rather carries forward an interpretive tradition that began with the German Idealists and continued with the Marburg Neo-Kantians: a tradition that attempted to unify Kant’s dual faculties of sensibility and understanding, and to therefore ground the metaphysical principles that depend on their unification. The Neo-Kantians unify the faculties by insisting that human cognition is understanding through and through; Kant was wrong to think we have a separate faculty of sensibility. This interpretation erases the signature discursivity of Kant’s position, the idea that two qualitatively different faculties are required for us to cognize. This chapter shows that Heidegger’s interpretation does not have this result, even though it prioritizes the faculty of imagination. Heidegger’s central thesis in his Kant book – that, on the best version of Kant’s argument, the imagination has priority as the source of cognition – rests crucially on the claim that the imagination is both receptive and spontaneous. Thus, Heidegger’s interpretation maintains Kant’s discursivity thesis, while inquiring more deeply into the unified receptivity and spontaneity that characterizes the human being.

In this chapter, I reconstruct the metaphysical deductions that, in my account, Kant presents in the Aesthetic, Analytic and Dialectic, respectively. I read metaphysical deductions as accomplishing the first task of transcendental philosophy as it is established in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely the task of cataloguing pure root concepts (Stammbegriffe) for the cognition of objects and to track their origin. I argue that the metaphysical deductions do not simply assume a distinction between different faculties. Rather, they contribute to establishing this distinction by identifying the origin of the root concepts they clarify and catalogue. Moreover, I show that Kant does not follow a univocal model in the different deductions. Rather, his approach is pluralistic.

This chapter establishes the core concept of ‘Romantic surgery’ by exploring the distinctive emotional, intellectual, and performative dimensions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British surgery. It opens by considering how, building on the legacy of John Hunter, Romantic surgeons constructed their practice as ‘scientific’, grounded in the study of anatomy and physiology. This allegedly more scientific approach to surgery encouraged greater operative restraint, but so too did the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility, which valorised the feelings of the patient and stressed the need to temper personal ambition with emotional sensitivity. This had profound implications for the performance of surgery, as surgeons were encouraged to eschew operative bravura in favour of a more considered deportment. As this chapter demonstrates, such emotional considerations also extended to the spectacle of surgery, as surgeons were expected to manage not only their patients and themselves, but also their audience. The performative persona of the Romantic surgeon was not without ambiguities, however, and this chapter therefore concludes with a study of perhaps the era’s most contested figure, Robert Liston.

This chapter considers the emotional interiorities and intersubjectivities of Romantic surgery. It challenges the well-established stereotype of the pre-anaesthetic surgeon as dispassionate butcher by demonstrating the ways in which surgical identities and subjectivities were shaped by a culture of emotional expression and reflection. The emotional ‘authenticity’ of pre-anaesthetic surgery was rooted in the embodied experience of operative practice, and the huge challenges that came from dealing with death, disease, and disfigurement on a daily basis. But as well as encouraging emotional introspection, the experience of pre-anaesthetic surgery also demanded that the surgeon manage his patients’ emotions. After all, in this period, fear, despondency, and other states of mind were regarded as an immediate cause of death. For this reason, surgeons needed to monitor their patients’ moods and imagine themselves into their position in order to regulate their own conduct and promote optimal operative outcomes. These relations between surgeons and patients were structured by a range of factors, notably gender. For that reason, this chapter concludes with a consideration of Romantic surgical intersubjectivity in practice, utilising Astley Cooper’s casebooks to explore the ‘emotion work’ of womanhood in the elaboration and understanding of breast cancer.