Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century

ISBN-13: 9783031133657 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023

Opis

This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the “limit cases” regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the mid-eighteenth century through to the first decade of the twentieth century—an era that has been called the ‘Age of Science’—the essays collected here consider the cultural ripple effects of those previously unimaginable revolutions in science and medicine on humanity’s understanding of being.

Spis treści

1 Introduction: Testing the Boundaries of Being in the Long Nineteenth Century

Part I The Limits of Life

2 Drunkenness, Compulsion, and the Disintegration of the Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth

3 Intersex Boundaries: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermaphroditic Bodies

4 The Catheter Life: a Social History of Ageing, Risk, and Surgical Innovation in Britain’s Long Nineteenth Century

Part II Death’s Embrace

5 He Does Not Suffer Now: Death and Citizenship in the National Tale 

6 “Thy paleness makes me glad”: Death, Sympathy, and the Body in Keats’s Isabella 

7 Poe In Extremis 

Part III The Veil of Consciousness 

8 “[T]o Feel Powers at Work in the Common Air Unfelt by Others”: Receptivity and the Vanishing Body in Nineteenth-Century

Literature and Culture 

9 Grasping Spiritualists and Besotted Scientists: The Female Medium’s Body as Battleground 

10 Consequential Madness: Gender and Power in Romantic-Period Madhouse Literature 

11 Wandering Attention: Victorian Daydreaming, Disembodiment, and the Boundaries of Consciousness

O autorze

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in English (Long-Eighteenth Century) at NUI Galway, Ireland. She has published a monograph on William Blake entitled Blake and the Failure of Prophecy (2021) and a range of articles and essays on gender and sexuality in Blake’s writing, and on women’s writing in the long-eighteenth century.

Michelle O’Connell is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published essays and articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and fiction, and is currently working on a full-length study of the construction of the nineteenth-century female poetic subject. 

Blurb

This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the “limit cases” regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the mid-eighteenth century through to the first decade of the twentieth century—an era that has been called the ‘Age of Science’—the essays collected here consider the cultural ripple effects of those previously unimaginable revolutions in science and medicine on humanity’s understanding of being.

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in English (Long-Eighteenth Century) at NUI Galway, Ireland. She has published a monograph on William Blake entitled Blake and the Failure of Prophecy (2021) and a range of articles and essays on gender and sexuality in Blake’s writing, and on women’s writing in the long-eighteenth century.

Michelle O’Connell is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published essays and articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and fiction, and is currently working on a full-length study of the construction of the nineteenth-century female poetic subject.