Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

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. Contents 10 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction: The Poetics of Vacancy 16 Women’s Poetry, Romanticism, and the Ideology of Empirical Feeling 22 From Vacant Sensibility to Vacancy’s Tropological Affects 31 “Come and behold the nothingness of all”: Athwart the Vacancy of Romantic Methodology 36 Tracing the Bounds of Vacancy 40 Chapter 1 Charlotte Smith and the Taste of Aporia 46 Elegiac Sonnets and the Impossibility of Taste 49 “Beachy Head” and the Hermit’s Impossible Receptivity 64 Chapter 2 Mary Robinson’s Intensities: Sensation after Oblivion 80 Vacant Repetition and the Leap Past Oblivion 82 Tracing the “Circling Bounds” of Robinson’s Intensity 92 Chapter 3 Reaping Songs and Ineffable Tales: William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley’s Singing Women and the Rave of Affect 108 Wordsworthian Intimations 111 Entrainment in “Alastor”: Eloquent Blood and Vacant Brain 116 From Vacant Minds to Vacancy 126 “Epipsychidion” and the Gender of Spirit 135 Chapter 4 Felicia Hemans’s Ruined Minds: Cognitive Overload and the Soul of Freedom 140 The “thought overwhelm’d” Widow and Her Soulful Ruination 143 “The Forest Sanctuary” and the New World of the Mind 155 Chapter 5 Maria Jane Jewsbury and the Phantom Feelings of the Moving Image 168 “No more, no more”: The Haunting of Nostalgic Picture Memory 171 Phantasmagoric Vision and Vacancy’s Ethical Blind Spots 176 Vacancy’s Vision: The Image of the Infant, Kinesis, and Pure Interchange 185 Coda The Phantom Menace and the Spirit of Affect 194 Notes 200 Works Cited 234 Index 264 "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 study 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" -- Provided by publisher