Document Type

Contribution to Book

Language

eng

Publication Date

2002

Publisher

International Conference on Romanticism

Source Publication

Inventing the Individual: Romanticism and the Idea of Individualism

Source ISSN

0972369708

Abstract

In 1816, Byron's Childe Harold bemoaned: "What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?/The heart's bleed longest, and but heal to wear/That which disfigures it" (III, 84), a fitting expression of the culture's fascination with psychic, emotional, and historical traumas. Felicia Hemans used these exact lines as an epigraph to her poem "The Indian City" in 1828, suggesting again the fascination with suffering that permeated the texts produced by this literary community.

Comments

Published version. "Inventing the Gothic Subject: Revolution, Secularization, and the Discourse of Suffering," in Inventing the Individual: Romanticism and the Idea of Individualism. Ed. Larry H. Peer. Provo, UT: International Conference on Romanticism, 2002: 5-16. Publisher link. © 2002 International Conference on Romanticism. Used with permission.

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