The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability

This book argues for the importance of disability to authors of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle. By examining texts in a variety of genres - ranging from self-experimental medical texts to lyric poetry to metaphysical essays - Stanback demonstrates the extent to which non-normative embodiment was central to Romantic-era thought and Romantic-era aesthetics. The book reassesses well-known literary and medical works by such authors as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Humphry Davy, argues for the importance of lesser-studied work by authors including Charles Lamb and Thomas Beddoes, and introduces significant unpublished work by Tom Wedgwood.

Autorentext
Emily B. Stanback is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, USA. She researches and teaches at the intersections of British Romantic literature, Disability Studies, and the history of medicine.

Inhalt
List of figures.- Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- 1. Citizen Thelwall and Thomas Beddoes M.D.: Romantic Medicines, Disability, and 'Health'.- 2. Pneumatic Self-Experimentation and the Aesthetics of Deviant Embodiment.- 3. 'an almost painful exquisiteness of Taste': Wedgwood's Pleasure and His Body in Pain.- 4. Between the Author 'Disabled' and the Coleridgean Imagination: STC's Epistolary Pathographies.- 5. Wordsworthian Encounters: Sympathy, Admonishment, and the Aesthetics of Human Difference.- 6. 'queer points' and 'answering needles': Lamb's Spectacular Metropolitanism and Modern Disability.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.-