Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life

An exploration of the Romantic obsession with power, submission and masochism, through readings of Byron, Keats, Burney and others.

Andrea K. Henderson (Author)

9780521884020, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 March 2008

314 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.59 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Henderson moves fluidly and with ease from discussions of novels, poems and plays to representations of 'painful pleasures' in art, architecture and landscaping.' Bryon Journal

In their pursuit of emotional extremes, writers of the Romantic period were fascinated by experiences of pain and misery, and explored the ability to derive pleasure, and produce creative energy, out of masochism and submission. These interests were closely connected to the failure of the industrial and democratic revolutions to fulfil their promise of increased economic and political power for everyone. Writers as different as Frances Burney, William Hazlitt, John Keats, and Lord Byron both challenged and came to terms with the injustices of modern life through their representations of submission. In this book, Andrea K. Henderson teases out these configurations and analyses the many ways ideas of mastery and subjection shaped Romantic artistic forms, from literature and art to architecture and garden design. This provocative and ambitious study ranges widely through early nineteenth-century culture to reveal the underlying power relations that shaped Romanticism.

Introduction: submitting to liberty
1. Finance and flagellation
2. From Sadism to masochism in the novels of Frances Burney
3. The Aesthetics of passion: Joanna Baillie's defense of the picturesque in an age of sublimity
4. Practicing politics in the comfort of home
5. Mastery and melancholy in suburbia
Conclusion: languishing femmes fatales
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]