Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art, and the Body

This book explores the dark regions of Romantic imagination in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and art. It uncovers the palpable and pleasing anxiety about the human body in the works of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley, focusing on the negotiations of pleasure and pain, life and death, beauty and monstrosity. Each of the works examined revolves in some manner around the breakdown of an idealized body in order to illuminate the transition from organic to fragmented form. This approach involves reorienting conventional accounts of Romanticism around the emergence of a visual paradigm. Engaging with cultures of print, aesthetic discourse, anatomical art, as well as natural historical knowledge circulating in England at the turn of the century, Dark Romanticism cultivates visual literacy and argues that literary and pictorial elements are inseparable when imagination is at work.