Debates about gender in the British Romantic period often invoked the idea of sexual enjoyment: there was a broad cultural concern about jouissance, the all-engulfing pleasure pertaining to sexual gratification. On one hand, these debates made possible the modern psychological concept of the unconscious - since desire was seen as an uncontrollable force, the unconscious became the repository of disavowed enjoyment and the reason for sexual difference. On the other hand, the tighter regulation of sexual enjoyment made possible a vast expansion of the limits of imaginable sexuality. In Sexual Enjoyment and British Romanticism, David Sigler shows how literary writers could resist narrowing gender categories by imagining unregulated enjoyment. As some of the era's most prominent thinkers - including Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Robinson, Joanna Southcott, Charlotte Dacre, Jane Austen, and Percy Bysshe Shelley - struggled to understand sexual enjoyment, they were able to devise new pleasures in a time of narrowing sexual possibilities. Placing Romantic-era literature in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism reveals the fictive structure of modern sexuality, makes visible the diversity of sexual identities from the period, and offers a new understanding of gender in British Romanticism.

The Romantic age, though often associated with free erotic expression, was ambivalent about what if anything sex had to do with the public sphere. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British texts often repressed the very sexual energies they claimed to be bringing into the open. The delineation of what could and could not be said and done in the name of physical pleasure was of a piece with the capitalist consecration of the social trust to the individual profit-motive. Both these practices, moreover, presupposed a determinate self with sovereignty over its own interests. Writings from and about some nominally public institutions were thus characterized by privatism—a sexual, economic and ontological withdrawal from otherness. Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One explores how this threefold ideology was both propagated and resisted, wittingly and unwittingly, successfully and unsuccessfully, in such Romantic "publics" as rape-law, sodomy-law, adultery-law, high-profile scandals, the population debates, and club-culture. It includes readings of imaginative literature by William Beckford, William Blake, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Hays, Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft; works of political economy by Jeremy Bentham, William Cobbett, William Godwin, William Hazlitt and Thomas Robert Malthus; as well as contemporary legal treatises, popular journalism and satirical pamphlets.

This is the first study to fully trace the influence of Sensibility on British Romanticism. Sensibility continually found new forms of expression in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century. Nagle explores how it coexisted and intermingled with Romanticism and revises the traditional narratives of literary periodization of this era.

Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

Demonstrates how women's writing formed a crucial, if underappreciated, part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic periodWomen writers in the Romantic period were reckoning with taboo topics such as female pleasure, masturbation, incest, necrophilia and the aftermaths of sexual violence. Building on recent research on the period's sexual culture, this collection develops a new approach to the study of gender and sexuality within Romanticism. The contributors examine how women writers were theorising perversions in their literary work and often leading transgressive sexual lives themselves. In doing so, the collection challenges current understandings of 'transgression' as a sexual category and shows how the Romantic literary tradition and the history of sexuality in Britain look quite different when one foregrounds the experimental sexual thought of the period's literary women.Kathryn Ready is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, specialising in eighteenth-century and Romantic literary studies, women's literature, and gender and sexuality. She is volume co-editor of LumenXLI (2023) and co-editor of the collection The Art of Exchange: Models, Forms and Practices of Sociability between Great Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century(2015).David Sigler is Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Canada, with research interests in British Romanticism, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism(2021) and Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism(2015).

David Bowie and Romanticism evaluates Bowie’s music, film, drama, and personae alongside eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets, novelists, and artists. These chapters expand our understanding of both the literature studied as well as Bowie’s music, exploring the boundaries of reason and imagination, and of identity, gender, and genre. This collection uses the conceptual apparata and historical insights provided by the study of Romanticism to provide insight into identity formation, drawing from Romantic theories of self to understand Bowie’s oeuvre and periods of his career. The chapters discuss key themes in Bowie’s work and analyze what Bowie has to teach us about Romantic art and literature as well.