Richard C. Sha . Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 359. $55.00.

Abstract

At the heart of Richard C. Sha's book is the claim of a homology, emerging in the period under consideration, between new descriptions of sexuality in medical and physiological literature and new accounts of the work of art in aesthetic treatises and in the art itself. The keynote of this homology is struck in Immanuel Kant's characterization of artwork as “purposiveness without a purpose,” that special status of art's orientation toward ends without any prior determination of what the particular end might be or the sense of art's existing “as if” it were directed toward an end without the end ever being given. The proto-sexology of Sha's roster of physiologists—Albrecht von Haller, John Hunter, Lazzaro Spallanzani, Franz Gall, Erasmus Darwin, John Brown, and others—parallels Kant's aesthetic thesis by freeing sexuality from being solely determined by its reproductive function, recognizing the competing claims of pleasure, emotional mutuality, and interrelation, all grouped by Sha under the heading of “perversity” for their turning away from reproductive function.