Romantic Identities
Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830

A study of Romantic conceptions of the self which do not depend on the model of psychological depth.

Andrea K. Henderson (Author)

9780521027106, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

216 pages, 15 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.334 kg

"Andrea Henderson's Romantic Identities is an ambitious and stimulating book that contains enlightening and enlivening readings of a wide range of literary and other writings from the Romantic period." Nineteenth-Century Literature

One of the defining features of Romantic writing, critics have long agreed, is its characterization of the self in terms of psychological depth. Many Romantic writers, however, did not conceive of the self in this way, and in Romantic Identities Andrea K. Henderson investigates that part of Romantic writing that challenges the 'depth' model, or operates outside its domain. Henderson explores forms of Romantic discourse, explains their economic and social contexts, and examines their differing conceptions of identity. Individual chapters treat the Romantic view of the self in embryo and at birth, the relation of gothic characterization to the ghostliness of exchange value, anti-essentialism in Romantic psychology, the conception of self as genre in writings by Percy and Mary Shelley, and the link between economic circulation and the distrust of psychological interiority in Scott.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: from coins to hearts: Romantic forms of subjectivity
1. Doll-machines and butcher-shop meat: models of childbirth in the early stages of industrial capitalism
2. 'An embarrassing subject': use value and exchange value in early gothic characterization
3. From 'race' to 'place' in 'The Prisoner of Chillon'
4. Incarnate imagination and The Cenci
5. Centrality and circulation in The Heart of Mid-Lothian
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]