Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature

243 Pages·2014·4.176 MB·English

by  Jeremy Davies

Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature
When writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries explored
the implications of organic and emotional sensitivity, the pain of the body
gave rise to unsettling but irresistible questions. Urged on by some of their
most deeply felt preoccupations—and in the case of fi gures like Coleridge
and P. B. Shelley, by their own experiences of chronic pain—many writers
found themselves drawn to the imaginative scrutiny of bodies in extremis.
Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature reveals the signifi cance of physical hurt
for the poetry, philosophy, and medicine of the Romantic period.
This study looks back to eighteenth-century medical controversies that
made pain central to discussions about the nature of life, and forward to
the birth of surgical anaesthesia in 1846. It examines why Jeremy Bentham
wrote in defence of torture, and how pain sparked the imagination of think-
ers from Adam Smith to the Marquis de Sade. Jeremy Davies brings to bear
on Romantic studies the fascinating recent work in the medical humanities
that off ers a fresh understanding of bodily hurt, and shows how pain could
prompt new ways of thinking about politics, ethics, and identity.
Jeremy Davies is a lecturer at the University of Leeds, UK.
Routledge Studies in Romanticism
1 Keats’s Boyish Imagination 9 Thomas De Quincey
Richard Marggraf Turley New Theoretical and Critical
Directions
2 Leigh Hunt Edited by Robert Morrison
Life, Poetics, Politics and Daniel S. Roberts
Edited by Nicholas Roe
10 Romanticism and Visuality
3 Leigh Hunt and the London Fragments, History, Spectacle
Literary Scene Sophie Thomas
A Reception History of his Major
Works, 1805–1828 11 Romanticism, History,
Michael Eberle-Sinatra Historicism
Essays on an Orthodoxy
4 Tracing Women’s Romanticism Edited by Damian Walford Davies
Gender, History and
Transcendence 12 The Meaning of “Life” in
Kari E. Lokke Romantic Poetry and Poetics
Edited by Ross Wilson
5 Metaphysical Hazlitt
Bicentenary Essays 13 German Romanticism and
Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin Science
and Duncan Wu The Procreative Poetics of Goethe,
Novalis, and Ritter
6 Romantic Genius and the Jocelyn Holland
Literary Magazine
Biography, Celebrity, Politics 14 Colonialism, Race, and the
David Higgins French Romantic Imagination
Pratima Prasad
7 Romantic Representations of
British India 15 Keats and Philosophy
Edited by Michael J. Franklin The Life of Sensations
Shahidha K. Bari
8 Sympathy and the State in the
Romantic Era 16 Animality in British
Systems, State Finance, and the Romanticism
Shadows of Futurity The Aesthetics of Species
Robert Mitchell Peter Heymans
17 Legacies of Romanticism
Literature, Culture, Aesthetics
Edited by Carmen Casaliggi
and Paul March-Russell
18 The Female Romantics
Nineteenth-century Women
Novelists and Byronism
Caroline Franklin
19 Bodily Pain in Romantic
Literature
Jeremy Davies
This page intentionally left blank
Bodily Pain in Romantic
Literature
Jeremy Davies
NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Jeremy Davies to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davies, Jeremy.
Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature / Jeremy Davies.
pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Romanticism 19)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Pain in literature. 2. English literature—18th century—History
and criticism. 3. Romanticism—Great Britain. 4. Literature and
medicine—Great Britain—History—18th century. 5. Human body in
literature. I. Title.
PR448.P25D38 2014
809'.93353—dc23
2013035115
ISBN13: 978-0-415-84291-4 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-75830-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
O Zeus,
what land have I come to?
—Sophocles, The Women of Trachis
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface xi
1 Romanticism and the Sense of Pain 1
2 Bentham’s Absolute 37
3 Sade’s Unreason 67
4 Living Thorns: Coleridge and Hartley 97
5 Shelley: A Sense of Senselessness 130
6 Conclusion 164
Notes 171
References 205
Index 223