Innovative, alternative account of romanticism, exploring how art and science together contested the evidentiary authority of the human body.

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.

Religious diversity and ferment characterize the period that gave rise to Romanticism in England. It is generally known that many individuals who contributed to the new literatures of the late eighteenth century came from Dissenting backgrounds, but we nonetheless often underestimate the full significance of nonconformist beliefs and practices during this period. Daniel White provides a clear and useful introduction to Dissenting communities, focusing on Anna Barbauld and her familial network of heterodox 'liberal' Dissenters whose religious, literary, educational, political, and economic activities shaped the public culture of early Romanticism in England. He goes on to analyze the roles of nonconformity within the lives and writings of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, offering a Dissenting genealogy of the Romantic movement.

Explores the developing cultural tensions and connections that created a 'sister-art' movement between creative visual art and its literary counterparts.

This book presents a series of essays which focus on the role of Romantic philosophy and ideology in the sciences.

Examines the massive impact of colonial exploration on British scientific and literary activity between the 1760s and 1830s.

This ambitious study, first published in 1999, argues that our conception of the aesthetic sphere emerged during the era of British and German Romanticism from conflicts between competing models of the liberal state and the cultural nation. The aesthetic sphere is thus centrally connected to 'aesthetic statism', which is the theoretical project of reconciling conflicts in the political sphere by appealing to the unity of the symbol. David Kaiser traces the trajectory of aesthetic statism from Schiller and Coleridge, through Arnold, Mill and Ruskin, to Adorno and Habermas. He analyses how the concept of aesthetic autonomy shifts from being a supplement to the political sphere to an end in itself; this shift lies behind the problems that contemporary literary theory has faced in its attempts to connect the aesthetic and political spheres. Finally, he suggests that we rethink the aesthetic sphere in order to regain that connection.