Nervous Reactions considers Victorian responses to Romanticism, particularly the way in which the Romantic period was frequently constructed in Victorian-era texts as a time of nervous or excitable authors (and readers) at odds with Victorian values of self-restraint, moderation, and stolidity. Represented in various ways—as a threat to social order, as a desirable freedom of feeling, as a pathological weakness that must be cured—this nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an important though as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. By attending to this nervousness, the essays in this volume offer a new consideration not only of the relationship between the Victorian and Romantic periods, but also of the ways in which our own responses to Romanticism have been mediated by this Victorian attention to Romantic excitability. Considering editions and biographies as well as literary and critical responses to Romantic writers, the volume addresses a variety of discursive modes and genres, and brings to light a number of authors not normally included in the longstanding category of "Victorian Romanticism": on the Romantic side, not just Wordsworth, Keats, and P. B. Shelley but also Byron, S. T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and on the Victorian side, not just Thomas Carlyle and the Brownings but also Sara Coleridge, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Archibald Lampman, and J. S. Mill. Contributors include D. M. R. Bentley, Kristen Guest, Joel Faflak, Grace Kehler, Donelle Ruwe, Alan Vardy, Lisa Vargo, Timothy J. Wandling, Joanne Wilkes, and Julia M. Wright.

Brain Mechanisms

Leading psychotherapists present a broad range of theoretical, philosophical, and clinical perspectives on the self-contained person who seeks therapy. With numerous enlightening case studies, they explore the characteristics of the self-contained patient--often a bright, dedicated, hardworking, and successful person who has decided to be self-reliant and to achieve without needing or acknowledging help. The experts also examine the provocations leading self-contained persons to seek therapy. This authoritative volume addresses the intricacies of working with the self-contained person, who is often competitive and ill at ease with experts, and proposes successful interventions for treating the ever-challenging and provocative self-contained patient.