NOTES
NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. See,for other examples, Jennifer Ford,Frederick Burwick,and Alan Richardson. 2. Note that limitations of space will force me at times to refer to the “realist novel” as a “monolithic category” of sorts, much as McKeon, by necessity, treats “romance idealism.” I hope, though, to redress this problem in my next book, Byron and the Constitution of the British Novel, to be co-written with Emily Allen. 3. To be clearer, many of the issues I will explore were in fact implemented in the eighteenth century, particularly with regard to poetry, including the opposition between a perverse sexual poetry and a “pure poetry,” as Linda Zionkowski has recently explained in Men’s Work; indeed, the term, pure poetry, was invented by the eighteenth century.The nineteenth century could be said, rather, to invent the aesthetic categories by which we would subsequently make sense of culture, including the contemporary sense of “culture” itself. 4. There is a large body of work on this issue. See, in particular, Ina Ferris, Achievement 1–78; John Taylor; Patrick Brantlinger, Reading Lesson; D. A. Miller, especially chapter 5; Athena Vrettos; John Mullan; Kate Flint, especially chapter 5; Jane Wood; Pamela K. Gilbert; Helen Small; and Peter Melville Logan. See also Elaine Showalter. 5. Few studies have dealt with the issue of the “nervous man” in the period. Notable exceptions include Jane Wood (chapter 2), Logan (chapter 2), and D.A. Miller 146-56, all of whom address the novel. Some studies have addressed the effeminacy of the poet, especially in terms of Keats, although these studies tend not to examine the Romantic medical discourse behind this effeminization: Marjorie Levinson’s Keats’s Life of Allegory; Susan Wolfson’s “Feminizing Keats”; Christopher Ricks; and James Najarian. See also Stephen Guy-Bray on Thomas Lovell Beddoes. On the feminization of Byron, see, in particular, Sonia Hofkosh, chapter 2, and Wolfson’s “ ‘Their She Condition.’ ” For the eighteenth-century precursors of this effeminization of poetry, see Zionkowski, chapter 1. Alan Richardson discusses the Romantic discourse of the nerves in relation to the Romantic poets but without significantly addressing the anxieties provoked by these discourses. Jennifer Ford addresses the fears connected to dreaming and the uncontrolled imagination in relation to the medical tracts of the day. On the pathologization of the category of genius and the relation of that pathology to Romantic literature, see Elfenbein, Romantic Genius. 6. On the Victorian social body, see Mary Poovey and Jon Klancher 38–46. 7. See Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice 72–95. 8. See Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” For a similar argument , see Ed Cohen, especially chapter 2. For Sedgwick’s classic study of homosocial desire, see Between Men. 163 9. I have not been able to take into account many fine books that came into print after this book had been sent for review, including Jerome McGann’s Byron and Romanticism (2002); Jane Stabler’s Byron, Poetics, and History (2002); andThomas Laqueur’s Solitary Sex (2003). CHAPTER 1. DIAGNOSING GENIUS 1. We can find the seeds of later developments even in the early works on genius. Whereas Joseph Warton sees “true genius” as the only disposition that can produce what he terms “pure poetry,” he also acknowledges that such a temperament is predisposed to debauchery (1.106). Alexander Gerard is concerned throughout his Essay on Genius to underline that genius requires proper bounds: “In a man of genius, imagination can scarce take a single step, but judgment should attend it. The most luxuriant fancy stands most in need of being checked by judgment” (75).Although he argues that similar faculties apply to both scientific and artistic genius, Gerard also associates “genius in the arts,” in particular, with strong passions, sometimes bordering on melancholy (416). Unlike genius for science, “genius for the arts can never exist where the passions have not great power over the imagination” (356).William Duff in his 1767 Essay on Original Genius aligns “original genius” particularly with poetry, which he in turn associates with “WILDNESS AND LUXURIANCE” (45), arguing that it is greatest when mankind is just “emerging from a state of ignorance and barbarity” (261). Duff also argues that poets are especially susceptible to passion: the poet “must himself be wrought up to a high pitch of extasy, if he expects to throw us into it. Indeed it is the peculiar felicity of an original Author to feel in the most exquisite degree...
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