Perverse Romanticism

Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832

Richard C. Sha

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781421402611
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Richard C. Sha's revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period.

Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism.

Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha's innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction.

At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Romantic Science and the Perversification of Sexual Pleasure
• 2 Historicizing Perversion: Perversity, Perversion, and the Rise of Function in the Biological Sciences
• 3 One Sex or Two? Nervous Bodies, Romantic Puberty, and the Natural Origins of Perverse Desires
• 4 The Perverse Aesthetics of Romanticism: Purposiveness with Purpose
• 5 Fiery Joys Perverted to Ten Commands: William Blake, the Perverse Turn, and Sexual Liberation
• 6 Byron, Epic Puberty, and Polymorphous Perversity
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index