Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism

Stephanie O'Rourke

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781316519028
• eBook ISBN: 9781009020121
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge
• Chapter 1 De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects
• Chapter 2 Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions
• Chapter 3 Girodet’s Electric Shocks
• Chapter 4 Self-Evidence on the Scaffold
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index