Dark Romanticism

“This admirable study takes up an unsettling aspect of Romanticism, appropriately termed ‘dark,’ in works by Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley. The numerous well-chosen images are not so much supplementary to the text as embedded in it, establishing a visual message concurrent with the verbal one. In all, this is one of the most stimulating books in one of the most energetically discussed areas of Romantic scholarship.”

—Morton D. Paley, Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA

“With over 50 stunning color images, this lucidly written study examines the liminal states of life and beauty, offering fresh insights into Frankenstein and the dark sensibilities that destabilize traditional notions of taste and genre. A masterful blend of art and literature, this book is as enlightening as it is captivating.”

—Sharon Ruston, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, UK

This book explores the dark regions of Romantic imagination in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and art. It uncovers the palpable and pleasing anxiety about the human body in the works of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley, focusing on the negotiations of pleasure and pain, life and death, beauty and monstrosity. Each of the works examined revolves in some manner around the breakdown of an idealized body in order to illuminate the transition from organic to fragmented form. This approach involves reorienting conventional accounts of Romanticism around the emergence of a visual paradigm. Engaging with cultures of print, aesthetic discourse, anatomical art, as well as natural historical knowledge circulating in England at the turn of the century, Dark Romanticism cultivates visual literacy and argues that literary and pictorial elements are inseparable when imagination is at work.

Silvia Riccardi is a postdoctoral researcher at Umeå University, Sweden, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and visual culture. She has previously held positions at the University of Freiburg and Uppsala University.