Romantic Vacancy

Kate Singer

Description

Romantic Vacancy argues that, at the cult of sensibility's height, Romantic writers found alternative tropes of affect to express movement beyond sensation and the body. Grappling with sensibility's claims that sensation could be translated into ideas and emotions, poets of vacancy rewrote core empiricist philosophies that trapped women and men in sensitive bodies and, more detrimentally, in ideological narratives about emotional response that gendered subjects' bodies and minds. Kate Singer contends that affect's genesis occurs instead through a series of figurative responses and movements that loop together human and nonhuman movements of mind, body, and nature into a posthuman affect. This book discovers a new form of Romantic affect that is dynamically linguistic and material. It seeks to end the long tradition of holding women and men writers of the Romantic period as separate and largely unequal. It places women writers at the forefront of speculative thinking, repositions questions of gender at the vanguard of Romantic-era thought, revises how we have long thought of gender in the period, and rewrites our notions of Romantic affect. Finally, it answers pivotal questions facing both affect studies and Romanticism about interrelations among language, affect, and materiality. Readers will learn more about the deep history of how poetic language can help us move beyond binary gender and its limiting intellectual and affective ideologies.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Poetics of Vacancy

1. Charlotte Smith and the Taste of Aporia

2. Mary Robinsons's Intensities: Sensation after Oblivion

3. Reaping Songs and Ineffable Tales: William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley's Singing Women and the Rave of Affect

4. Felicia Hemans's Ruined Minds: Cognitive Overload and the Soul of Freedom

5. Maria Jane Jewsbury and the Phantom Feelings of the Moving Image

Coda The Phantom Menace and the Spirit of Affect

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Europe
• Gothic
• Gender studies
• Romanticism

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438475295
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Romantic Vacancy
“For some time now there has been what we might call a movement that attends in Romantic writing to affects and states of being we had previously neglected or simply missed altogether. A generation of scholars, junior and senior, is mapping out this uncharted territory in the most original manner, along the way teaching us how to be with Romanticism, and how Romanticism has always been with us, in ways that are teaching all of us in turn how to be with the present. We can put Kate Singer’s Romantic Vacancy —smart, insightful, beautifully argued—at the vanguard of this movement, proof of the fact that any rumours of the death of our field are not only highly exaggerated but just plain wrong.”
— Joel Faflak, author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery
“ Romantic Vacancy offers compelling close readings of Romantic women poets and two canonical male poets (Shelley and Wordsworth). After reading this book, Romantic-era scholars will no longer be able to read these poets in the same way again—I think this book will be a game changer for scholars working on women poets. This is a very fine work that should have a significant influence on the field.”
— Daniela Garofalo, author of Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism
ROMANTIC VACANCY
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
ROMANTIC VACANCY
The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation
Kate Singer
Cover art: Sonia Gechtoff, The Beginning , 1960. Denver Art Museum: Vance H. Kirkland Acquisition Fund. 2015.62. © Sonia Gechtoff. Photography courtesy of Denver Art Museum.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Singer, Kate, 1977– author.
Title: Romantic vacancy : the poetics of gender, affect, and radical speculation / Kate Singer, State University of New York.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040338| ISBN 9781438475271 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438475295 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Sentimentalism in literature. | Senses and sensation in literature. | Romanticism—Great Britian.
Classification: LCC PR468.S46 S56 2019 | DDC 820.9/353—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040338
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my mother, who taught me to read
To my father, who taught me to dream
And to Bue, who teaches me how to be
C ONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION The Poetics of Vacancy
CHAPTER 1 Charlotte Smith and the Taste of Aporia
CHAPTER 2 Mary Robinson’s Intensities: Sensation after Oblivion
CHAPTER 3 Reaping Songs and Ineffable Tales: William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley’s Singing Women and the Rave of Affect
CHAPTER 4 Felicia Hemans’s Ruined Minds: Cognitive Overload and the Soul of Freedom
CHAPTER 5 Maria Jane Jewsbury and the Phantom Feelings of the Moving Image
CODA The Phantom Menace and the Spirit of Affect
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as a project at the University of Maryland, thanks to the untiring tutelage of Neil Fraistat, whose planetary visions and Shelleyan spirit still revolve and reimagine Romanticism, and of Orrin N. C. Wang, who taught me to read like de Man, to revise like Derrida, and to think poised on the abyss. My many thanks to my other wonderful mentors Jason Rudy, Laura Rosenthal, Bill Cohen, and Tita Chico, who helped me write through and believe in the possibility of this project. I was lucky enough to be aided and abetted at UMD by two writing groups, Radioheadites Heidi Scott, Joseph Byrne, Elizabeth Whitney, and the salvific sisterhood of Kelly McGovern, Sarah Hamilton Kimmet, Joanne Baste, Rebecca Borden, and Caroline Egan. My MFA poet-mentors and grad school friends first taught me, and continue to teach me, about poetics and affect in the thick atmosphere of the Beltway, especially Josh Mensch, Joanna Osborne (aka Nick Flynn), and our 16th-Street corridor family, particularly Alex Orr, Charlie Clark, Paul Bolstad, Emily Manus, the Kahla-Lewandowskis, and the King-Woodses.
I won the colleague lottery when I landed at Mount Holyoke and was gifted an assemblage suffused with brilliant, witty coolness. Thank you Amy Martin for your continuous mentoring and savvy conversation; Elizabeth Young for the graceful, studied advice and encouragement about this book and the project of academia; Iyko Day for your constant intellectual and gourmet generosity, especially all of your theory-infused Noho salons; Wes Yu for your always precise thoughtfulness; Nigel Alderman for your co-processing and literary companionship; Suparna Roychaudry for redirecting my attention to aesthetic beauty; Jenny Pyke for your object lessons, affect playlists, and Eliotesque sympathies; and Amy Rodgers for reminding me to laugh while at the factory and for teaching me independence of thought and true interdisciplinary friendship. I have been doubly blessed to have amazing colleagues in the Five Colleges as well. Romanticism is alive and well in our small band of Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, Daniel Block, Amelia Worsley, and Lily Gurton-Wachter. Thank you especially to Amelia and Lily for your gifted affective reading and final-stages pep talks. I am irreparably entangled with my truly amazing Mount Holyoke students, especially those who trooped through British Romanticism, Romantic Epistemologies, Feminist Poetics, Posthuman Affect Theory, and Love, Sex, and Death in the Anthropocene. I am forever in your debt for all that you have shown me, taught me, felt with me, and allowed me to attempt to articulate. You are our future-to-come. As if an alma mater , Mount Holyoke College has been generous with its fellowship and multiple faculty grants that enabled research in the United States and the UK. Many thanks, as well, to the Keats-Shelley Association of America, which offered a Pforzheimer Grant to support this project and whose continued support of Romantic-era endeavors has been an inspiration and bildung in communicating literary spirits to the wider world.
Somehow, along the first-book Sisyphean road, I have been granted some amazing colleagues and friends. My thanks to Daniel Robinson, Orianne Smith, Noah Comet, C. C. Wharram, Devoney Looser, and Libby Fay for reading and serving as academic GPSes at crucial moments. To Nan Sweet for teaching me the complex intricacies of Hemans, of editing, and of deep scholarship. Thank you to my unpantsed writing group who read many pieces of this project with ever-incisive annotations about Romanticism and writing: Ashley Cross, Yohei Igarashi, Suzanne Barnett, Chris Washington, and Michael Gamer. My new materialist assemblage, Suzanne L. Barnett and Ashley J. Cross—aka the Thunder Bitches—thank you for teaching me to live in the flows of transgressive thinking and brownie being. Thank you Gamer for the twenty-third hour readerly kick in the pants at exactly the time I needed it. Thank you David Sigler for all your insuperable grace in reading, editing, and eloquence. That punning pack of Keatsians cards at the Keats Letters Project, Ian Newman, Anne McCarthy, Brian Rejack, Emily Stanback, and Michael Theune, has taught me new forms of collaboration, friendship, and virtual pleasure. #yykm. A special thank you, Ashley, for your genius-in-a-garret Robinsonian work as you read so much of this, so many times, with your organizational and intellectual superpowers. Likewise, I was able to complete this book thanks to the painstaking work of the readers of the manuscript and to Daniela Garofalo, who read an earlier draft.
My whole heart goes to my extended family of choice, my mom and Milan and all the Steins, especially Sammy, who is a true mensch, and Aunt Lea, Jodie, and Margie, who continue to be models of caring women who work. Thank you Mom for processing all my beta waves, for being there, and for showing me that repair, change, and love are always possible. My brother, who has given lots of “listen, pal” advice to be weighed and not taken, you carry our father’s generosity and corniness, which is only unmasked sentiment and heart. To DLO, all the years of support and triage cannot be erased from this project; I only hope the future will bring new affects for us both. Thank you for teaching me stamina, endurance, and strength, even if these are not the words you would have had me write. Thank you, Ilene, for being a friend, the Blanche to my Dorothy. Long may we eat taco dip and drink champs while sitting on the beach of DC politics. Only good things happen when we’re driving in the car to Target.
And, finally, for Chris, who is the trace. If there is any starlight in these words, it is surely yours.
The chapter on Maria Jane Jewsbury is derived, in part, from an article published in European Romantic Review on August 29, 2012, and available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10509585.2012.709792 . A piece of the Mary Robinson cha