British Romanticism and the Matter of Voice

Auteur
Alice Rhodes is an honorary research associate at The University of York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She has held fellowships with The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the British Association for Romantic Studies, and has published articles in Essays in Romanticism and European Romantic Review.

Texte du rabat

Bringing together ideas about poetry, philosophy, medicine, and politics to investigate the relationship between bodies and voices in Romantic-era British literature, Alice Rhodes reveals how Erasumus Darwin, John Thelwall, and Percy Bysshe Shelley came to present the voice as a form of physical, autonomous, and effective political action.

Résumé
Physiological, political, and poetic studies of the relationship between the human body and voice saw increased attention and took on new significance in British literature of the politically turbulent period between the 1770s and the 1820s. Focusing on Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, three writers whose works draw together the fields of science, politics, language, and literature, and who were subject to charges of political radicalism and materialist philosophy, Alice Rhodes draws attention to a developing theory of spoken and poetic utterance which, for its subscribers, suggested a fundamental, material, and reciprocal connection between the speaking body and the physical, social, and political worlds around it. By investigating the Romantic-era fascination with the mechanics and physiology of speech production, she explores how Darwin, Thelwall, and Shelley came to present the voice as a form of physical, autonomous, and effective political action.

Contenu
Introduction: mechanic art and elocutionary science; 1. Erasmus Darwin and the mechanics of speech; 2. John Thelwall and the physiology of speech; 3. Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poetry of speech; Coda: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the speaking body; Bibliography.