Dark Romanticism

In its investigation of transmedia and materialism, Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art, and the Body offers innovative readings of literature and art that engage aesthetics and epistemologies in the period. Weaving the work of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley, the study cogently thematises an aesthetics of the body that provocatively dismantles human form and challenges tradition. By productively bringing together their varied work, Silvia Riccardi helps us reassess cultural anxieties that emerged from intellectual debates surrounding literature, art, and empirical knowledge. Its focus on aesthetic ambiguities and epistemological murkiness convincingly argues for the reformulation of dark Romantic sensibilities.

-Jolene Zigarovich, Associate Professor of English, University of Northern Iowa, USA

This book explores the dark regions of Romantic imagination in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and art. It uncovers the palpable and pleasing anxiety about the human body in the works of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley, focusing on the negotiations of pleasure and pain, life and death, beauty and monstrosity. Each of the works examined revolves in some manner around the breakdown of an idealized body in order to illuminate the transition from organic to fragmented form. This approach involves reorienting conventional accounts of Romanticism around the emergence of a visual paradigm. Engaging with cultures of print, aesthetic discourse, anatomical art, as well as natural historical knowledge circulating in England at the turn of the century, this book cultivates visual literacy and argues that literary and pictorial elements are inseparable when imagination is at work.

Silvia Riccardi is a postdoctoral researcher at Umeå University, Sweden, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and visual culture.