Romantic Identities

One of the defining features of Romantic writing, critics have long agreed, is its characterization of the self in terms of psychological depth. Many Romantic writers, however, did not conceive of the self in this way, and in Romantic Identities Andrea K. Henderson investigates that part of Romantic writing that challenges the ‘depth’ model, or operates outside its domain. Henderson explores forms of Romantic discourse, explains their economic and social contexts, and examines their differing conceptions of identity. Individual chapters treat the Romantic view of the self in embryo and at birth, the relation of gothic characterization to the ghostliness of exchange value, anti-essentialism in Romantic psychology, the conception of self as genre in writings by Percy and Mary Shelley, and the link between economic circulation and the distrust of psychological interiority in Scott.

• Challenges traditional view of Romantic conceptions of the self • Sets literature in dialogue with other disciplines, including obstetrics and physiology • Discusses canonical authors in new light, and compares their work with non-canonical texts

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: from coins to hearts: Romantic forms of subjectivity; 1. Doll-machines and butcher-shop meat: models of childbirth in the early stages of industrial capitalism; 2. ‘An embarrassing subject’: use value and exchange value in early gothic characterization; 3. From ‘race’ to ‘place’ in ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’; 4. Incarnate imagination and The Cenci; 5. Centrality and circulation in The Heart of Mid-Lothian; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index.