Romanticism and the Body

Abstract

Romantic scholarship in the last decade of the twentieth century effectively transformed the object of study, bringing not only new attention to women writers and issues of slavery, empire, and colonialism into the field but making slave narratives, antislavery writing, and writing by women in many genres integral to a newly expanded and configured Romantic canon. At the same time, certain leading descriptions of the older canon, dominated by poetry and a handful of male writers, remained current, especially the notion that Romantic poetry sought transcendence and an ideal realm at the price of denying the body and material nature. This essay looks at a variety of new work on Romanticism and the body that challenges and revises that description, eliciting a pronounced materialist tendency found in a number of Romantic-era discourses, authors, and texts. The new emphasis on the body and on the embodiment of mind brings together several subfields within Romantic scholarship, including literature and medicine, literature and scientific psychology, ecocriticism, environmental and diet studies, recent developments in colonial discourse studies and feminist criticism, and cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to reading Romanticism. Two of the most exciting developments in British Romantic scholarship during the 1990s not only contributed to new critical and theoretical perspectives on the field, but have changed the very way that the field is constituted: what “counts” as a Romantic text, what gets anthologized, what gets taught. The recovery and revaluation of Romantic-era texts written by women, growing out of the feminist critique of canonical, male-authored texts in the 1980s, effectively transformed and rejuvenated the field: dozens of authors barely mentioned for over a century came back into focus ‐ not to mention into print ‐ in ways that challenged reigning descriptions of Romanticism and threw “Romanticism” itself as a descriptive term into crisis. Even authors who had long remained available, most notably Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, became newly central to the field: for the first time, a young Romanticist might be expected to know and teach Emma as well as The Prelude . Alongside of (and overlapping with) the new scholarship on women writers, came an unprecedented attention to the relation of Romantic-era culture to matters of empire and colonialism, nation and ethnicity, slavery, and “race.” This newly globalized