Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation

Description

Romantic Vacancy argues that, at the cult of sensibility's height, Romantic writers found alternative tropes of affect to express movement beyond sensation and the body. Grappling with sensibility's claims that sensation could be translated into ideas and emotions, poets of vacancy rewrote core empiricist philosophies that trapped women and men in sensitive bodies and, more detrimentally, in ideological narratives about emotional response that gendered subjects' bodies and minds. Kate Singer contends that affect's genesis occurs instead through a series of figurative responses and movements that loop together human and nonhuman movements of mind, body, and nature into a posthuman affect. This book discovers a new form of Romantic affect that is dynamically linguistic and material. It seeks to end the long tradition of holding women and men writers of the Romantic period as separate and largely unequal. It places women writers at the forefront of speculative thinking, repositions questions of gender at the vanguard of Romantic-era thought, revises how we have long thought of gender in the period, and rewrites our notions of Romantic affect. Finally, it answers pivotal questions facing both affect studies and Romanticism about interrelations among language, affect, and materiality. Readers will learn more about the deep history of how poetic language can help us move beyond binary gender and its limiting intellectual and affective ideologies. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Poetics of Vacancy Women’s Poetry, Romanticism, and the Ideology of Empirical Feeling From Vacant Sensibility to Vacancy’s Tropological Affects “Come and behold the nothingness of all”: Athwart the Vacancy of Romantic Methodology Tracing the Bounds of Vacancy Chapter 1 Charlotte Smith and the Taste of Aporia Elegiac Sonnets and the Impossibility of Taste “Beachy Head” and the Hermit’s Impossible Receptivity Chapter 2 Mary Robinson’s Intensities: Sensation after Oblivion Vacant Repetition and the Leap Past Oblivion Tracing the “Circling Bounds” of Robinson’s Intensity Chapter 3 Reaping Songs and Ineffable Tales: William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley’s Singing Women and the Rave of Affect Wordsworthian Intimations Entrainment in “Alastor”: Eloquent Blood and Vacant Brain From Vacant Minds to Vacancy “Epipsychidion” and the Gender of Spirit Chapter 4 Felicia Hemans’s Ruined Minds: Cognitive Overload and the Soul of Freedom The “thought overwhelm’d” Widow and Her Soulful Ruination “The Forest Sanctuary” and the New World of the Mind Chapter 5 Maria Jane Jewsbury and the Phantom Feelings of the Moving Image “No more, no more”: The Haunting of Nostalgic Picture Memory Phantasmagoric Vision and Vacancy’s Ethical Blind Spots Vacancy’s Vision: The Image of the Infant, Kinesis, and Pure Interchange Coda The Phantom Menace and the Spirit of Affect Notes Works Cited Index