Disabling Romanticism

Michael Bradshaw is Professor of English at Edge Hill University, UK. He has published extensively on Romanticism, including Keats, the Shelleys, The London Magazine, Romantic generations, and Romantic fragment poems; publications include Resurrection Songs: the Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2001), and The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2007).

This book investigates the presence of disability in British Romantic literature, as subject matter, as metaphorical theme, and as lived experience. It is the first collection of its kind, breaking new ground in re-interpreting key texts and providing a challenging overview of this emerging field. The collection offers both a critique of academic Romantic studies and an affirmation of the responsiveness of the Romantic canon to new stimuli. Authors discussed include William Blake, Lord Byron, Ann Batten Cristall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Darley, Richard Payne Knight, William Gilpin, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth.

Examines a range of texts, from canonical to lesser-known, bringing some examples of the latter back to prominence

Foreword; Peter Kitson and Tom Shakespeare.- Acknowledgements.- Notes on Contributors.- 1. Introduction; Michael Bradshaw and Essaka Joshua.- 2. Picturesque Aesthetics: Theorising Deformity in the Romantic Era; Essaka Joshua.- 3. Disability, Sympathy, and Encounter in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798); Emily B. Stanback.- 4. 'Psychological Curiosit[ies]' from an 'Intellectual Giant': Coleridge, Disease, Disability, and Drugs; Corey Goergen.- 5. 'In mental as in visual darkness lost': Southey's Songs for a Mad King'; David Chandler.- 6. Mary Robinson's Paralysis and the Discourse of Disability; William D. Brewer.- 7. Blakean Wonder and the Unfallen Tharmas: Health, Wholeness, and Holarchy in The Four Zoas; Matt Lorenz.- 8. 'An uneasy mind in an uneasy body': Byron, Disability, Authorship, and Biography; Christine Kenyon Jones.- 9. Autistic Voice and Literary Architecture in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Julia Miele Rodas.- 10. A Hundred Tongues: George Darley's Stammer; Jeremy Davies.- Index.-