Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era [Hardcover]

This is the first study to fully trace the influence of Sensibility on British Romanticism. Sensibility continually found new forms of expression in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century. Nagle explores how it coexisted and intermingled with Romanticism and revises the traditional narratives of literary periodization of this era.The Pleasures of Proximity 'The Heart's Best Blood': Sterne and the Promiscuous Life of Sensibility From Trembling to Tranquility: Women Writers and Wordsworth's Pleasure Principle Epistemologies of the Romantic Closet: Shakespeare, Sexuality, and the Myth of Genius The Social Work of Persuasion: Austen and the New Sensorium Prometheus vs. the Man of Feeling: Frankenstein, Sensibility, and the Uncertain Future of Romanticism (An Allegory for Literary History) Sentimental Journeys: The Afterlife of Feeling in Landon and Tennyson

This is an ambitious study that argues for the continuance of Sensibility within Romanticism, embedded within texts by writers who ostensibly rejected its excesses in favor of more directed models of psychological development, and seeking social cohesion in other modes. A strength of the study is, thus, one of range: not many studies move with equal surefootedness from Lawrence Sterne to Tennyson, and across genres from fiction to poetry. - Peter Manning, SUNY-Stony Brook University

This book opens the door to the Romantic closet at last. Besides dealing with issues of gender and sexuality as they have rarely been addressed, Nagle exposes romanticism's deep debt to the culture of sensibility and all the complexity of deep personal response that culture implies. This remarkable study deals with the major poets, women writers of both poetry and prose, and it demonstrates the ways in which Romantic writers are in active dialogue with predecessors of Sensibility. It opens the Romantic era to so much of the politics of pleasure that were seething within it all along. - George E. Haglƒ+