Whether the rapt trances of Romanticism or the corpse-like figures that confounded Victorian science and religion, nineteenth-century depictions of bodies in suspended animation are read as manifestations of broader concerns about the unknowable in Anne C. McCarthy’s Awful Parenthesis. Examining various aesthetics of suspension in the works of poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, McCarthy shares important insights into the nineteenth-century fascination with the sublime.
Attentive to differences between "Romantic" and "Victorian" articulations of suspension, Awful Parenthesis offers a critical alternative to assumptions about periodization. While investigating various conceptualizations of suspension, including the suspension of disbelief, suspended animation, trance, paralysis, pause, and dilatation, McCarthy provides historically-aware close readings of nineteenth-century poems in conversation with prose genres that include devotional works, philosophy, travel writing, and periodical fiction. Awful Parenthesis reveals the cultural obsession with the aesthetics of suspension as a response to an expanding, incoherent world in crisis, one where the audience is both active participant and passive onlooker.
Anne C. McCarthy is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations Introduction - The Aesthetics of Suspension Chapter 1 - Coleridge, Suspension, and the Sublime Chapter 2 - Semblances of Truth in "Christabel" and Aids to Reflection Chapter 3 - The Aesthetics of Contingency in Shelley’s "Universe of Things" Chapter 4 - Tennyson and the Rhetoric of Suspended Animation Chapter 5 - Christina Rossetti’s Poetic Faith Bibliography
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Christopher Stokes
"Awful Parenthesis is elegantly written, well-researched, thoroughly prepared, and up-to-date on existing scholarship."
Monique Morgan
"Awful Parenthesis offers an important, interesting addition to the fields of Romantic and Victorian literature, and contributes to renewed interest in Victorian poetry and in poetic form. Tying together an intriguing mixture of highly canonical works and lesser-known texts, Awful Parenthesis will have a strong appeal to faculty and graduate students working on Romanticism, Victorian literature, and poetry more broadly."