Romantic Bodyscapes

By the turn of the nineteenth century, sparked by the Enlightenment, the metaphysical framework which, for a long period, had provided the dominant sheltering and ordering super-structure of Western societies, had ultimately imploded into the sheer physicality and mental autonomy of the free individual, whosenovel status had found thorough ideological expression in the American and French revolutions. While Romantic-era studies have traditionally concentrated on the concomitant elevation of the mind in literature, philosophy and the arts, the essays collected here draw attention to the fact that the body, in significant and interrelated ways, was equally allotted a new fundamental position. Taking travel reports, cartoons, poetry, drama, novels, gallows literature, philosophical reflections and (pseudo-)scientific treatises into consideration, the contributorscover such diverse topics as the relationship between bodies and landscapes, the worrying fact of the body's porousness,the impact of elemental forces on bodies and minds, the body as a signifier of mental processes as well as a locus of history and cultural memory, and the spectacularisation of the freakish, alien or criminal body.