Sexuality & the Culture of Sensibility

This is the first study to fully trace the influence of Sensibility on British Romanticism. Sensibility continually found new forms of expression in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century. Nagle explores how it coexisted and intermingled with Romanticism and revises the traditional narratives of literary periodization of this era.

Review:

"This is an ambitious study that argues for the continuance of Sensibility within Romanticism, embedded within texts by writers who ostensibly rejected its excesses in favor of more directed models of psychological development, and seeking social cohesion in other modes. A strength of the study is, thus, one of range: not many studies move with equal surefootedness from Lawrence Sterne to Tennyson, and across genres from fiction to poetry." - Peter Manning, SUNY-Stony Brook University

"This book opens the door to the Romantic closet at last. Besides dealing with issues of gender and sexuality as they have rarely been addressed, Nagle exposes romanticism's deep debt to the culture of sensibility and all the complexity of deep personal response that culture implies. This remarkable study deals with the major poets, women writers of both poetry and prose, and it demonstrates the ways in which Romantic writers are in active dialogue with predecessors of Sensibility. It opens the Romantic era to so much of the politics of pleasure that were seething within it all along." - George E. Haggerty, University of California, Riverside

"This elegant study, with its creative synthesis of historicism, gender studies, and queer theory and its superlative close readings, provides exciting new analyses of classic works by Austen, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others. Arguing for a politics of pleasure that can be traced to the enduring influence of Sterne, Nagle offers a bold and stimulating assessment of the persistent role of sensibility through the Romantic period and well into the Victorian era. Nagle s original juxtaposition of canonical and non-canonical works yields a study that convinces readers of overlooked connections and under-appreciated continuities. This book is bound to alter irrevocably our understanding of literary culture at the turn of the nineteenth century." - Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Boston College