Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age 1750-1850

Sick Heroes examines the cultural practices that created those remarkably offensive, though strangely appealing, romantic heroes that appeared in European and especially in French literature in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Romanticism has long been considered a literary movement, but Pasco broadens its scope and, using methodologies of sociology, psychology, history and literary criticism, suggests that it was a cultural reality born of widespread social factors and sustained by a mass market for novels, poems and plays that popularized attitudes and behaviour. The French romantic hero incarnated and played out the deep-seated needs and dreams of the people of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Making use of new research materials, Sick Heroes offers fresh insight into the romantic spirit. It sheds light on the particular creations of the romantic world, on the causes for Romanticism, on French Romanticism as an aesthetic and social reality, and on the period's collective mentality.