Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet's Body

That medicine becomes professionalized at the very moment that literature becomes "Romantic" is an important coincidence, and James Allard makes the most of it. His book restores the physical body to its proper place in Romantic studies by exploring the status of the human body during the period. With meticulous detail, he documents the way medical discourse consolidates a body susceptible to medical authority that is then represented in the works of Romantic era poets. In doing so, he attends not only to the history of medicine's professionalization but significantly to the rhetoric of legitimation that advances the authority of doctors over the bodies of patients and readers alike. After surveying trends in Romantic-era medicine and analyzing the body's treatment in key texts by Wordsworth and Joanna Baillie, Allard moves quickly to his central subject-the Poet-Physician. This hybrid figure, discovered in the works of the medically trained John Keats, John Thelwall, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, embodies the struggles occasioned by the discrepancies and affinities between medicine and poetry.

General Editors’ Preface, Vincent Newey, Joanne Shattock; Introduction: Bodytalk, James Robert Allard; Part 1 Romantic(izing) Bodies, James Robert Allard; Chapter 1 Body Conscious, James Robert Allard; Chapter 2 “Flesh and Blood”, James Robert Allard; Part 2 Embodying Romanticism(s), James Robert Allard; Chapter 3 “Great Vital Organs”, James Robert Allard; Chapter 4 “Shap’d and Palpable”, James Robert Allard; Chapter 5 “The Body’s Laws”, James Robert Allard; Part 3 Coda, James Robert Allard; Chapter 102 Apollo’s Poets, James Robert Allard;

James Robert Allard is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University, Canada.