Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 75) - Hardcover

Henderson, Andrea K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521884020 ISBN 13: 9780521884020

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

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. This provocative and ambitious study ranges widely through early nineteenth-century culture to reveal the underlying power relations that shaped Romanticism.

About the Author:

Andrea K. Henderson is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0521884020
• ISBN 13: 9780521884020
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 314