Abstracts
Abstract
Mary Robinson’s sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets (1796) is at once a celebration of the Greek poet’s eminence, as Robinson suggests in the preface, and a commentary on the reason and sensibility dialectic that dominated the 18th century. As such, it dramatizes the conflict between reason and sensibility, which is here also associated with erotic desire, showing the repercussions that the excess of feeling has upon the self without the governing principle of reason. This essay argues that Robinson drew upon the pathology of love melancholy, as well as on sublime and gothic aesthetics, to render the state of disjointed selfhood as a personal and artistic crisis which cannot be sublimated into art, and which subsequently results in the poet’s creative impasse and death. It also stresses the idea that through Sappho, Robinson aimed to represent the figure of the eighteenth-century woman writer, showing the need for a balance between reason and feeling so that desire could be transformed into artistic energy to serve a social purpose within the public sphere, addressing more universal issues of the human condition instead of focusing on private sorrows.
Appendices
Works Cited
- Backscheider, Paula R. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
- Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Cult of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Behrendt, Stephen C. British Women Poets and the Romantic Community. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
- Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. University of California Press, 2008. (1965)
- Bright, Timothie. A Treatise of Melancholie. London, 1586.
- Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is, with all kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it. In Three Partitions. Philadelphia: J. W. Moore, 1857.
- Cheyne, George. The English Malady,Or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds. London, 1733.
- Csengei, Ildiko. Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
- Cross, Ashley. Mary Robinson and the Genesis of Romanticism, Literary Dialogues and Debts, 1784–1821. Routledge, 2017.
- Cross, Ashley. “He—She Philosophers and Other Literary Bugbears: Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England.” Women’s Writing, 9:1 (2002), 53-68.
- Dawson, Lesel. Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Dolan, Elizabeth A. “British Romantic melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, medical discourse and the problem of sensibility.” Journal of European Studies, vol. 33, no. 3-4, December 2003, 237-253.
- Fay, Elizabeth A. A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism. Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
- Ferrand, Jacques. Erotomania: Or, A Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure of Love, Or Erotique Melancholy. Translated by Edmund Chilmead. Oxford, 1640.
- Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement”, “Papers on Metapsychology” and Other Works, v.14. Vintage, 2001: 237-259.
- Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge University Press, 2006.**
- –. Lectures on Metaphysic. Trans. and ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon. Cambridge University Press, 2001. (1997)
- Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia University Press, 1989.
- Labbe, Jacqueline M. “Pathological Sensibility.” Women’s Writing, 23:3 (2016), 354-365.
- Lawlor, Clark. “Fashionable Melancholy.” Melancholy Experience in Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century Before Depression, 1660–1800. Ed. Allan Ingram, Stuart Sim, et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 25-53.
- Lechte, John. “Art, Love, and Melancholy in the Work of Julia Kristeva.” Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. Ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin. Routledge, 1990.
- Lloyd, Henry Martyn. “The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment”, The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. Edited by Henry Martyn Lloyd. Springer, 2013.
- Prins, Yopie. Victorian Sappho. Princeton University Press, 1999.
- Robinson, Daniel. The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
- Robinson, Mary. Mary Robinson: Selected Poems. Ed. Judith Pascoe. Broadview Press, 2000.
- Robinson, Mary. A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter. Edited by Sharon M. Setzer. Broadview Literary Texts, 2003.
- Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Cornell University Press, 1992.
- Sickels, Eleanor M. The Gloomy Egoist, Moods and Themes of Melancholy from Gray to Keats. Columbia University Press, 1932.
- Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems. Vol I. London: Printed by T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1800.
- Van Sant, Ann Jessie. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Vila, Anne C. Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
- Wallace, Miriam L. Revolutionary Subjects in the English “Jacobin” Novel, 1790-1805. Bucknell University Press, 2009.
- Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Ed. Janet Todd, Oxford University Press, 1993.