Vascular Aesthetics: Blood and British Poetry in the Long Nineteenth Century Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

This dissertation examines how medical discourses of blood animate the physiological aesthetics of four nineteenth-century poets: William Wordsworth, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Building on concepts from Paul Youngquist, James Robert Allard, and Jason R. Rudy, I use the term “physiological aesthetics” to refer to poetic constructions and meanings that reveal an interest in the material conditions of embodiment and health that is informed by contemporary developments in physiology. While scholars of nineteenth-century British literature have examined how medical knowledge inspires poetic discourse in the period, few studies consider the agency attached to the blood in Romantic and Victorian poetry and the salience of blood in nineteenth-century medical paradigms. As emerging and entrenched ideas about blood, its composition, and its motions enriched physiological conceptions of health and disease, so, too, did Romantic and Victorian poets use blood to articulate the aesthetic intricacies of their poetry, especially the embodied complexities of creativity and desire.

Vascular Aesthetics analyzes poetic texts alongside medical texts from the period and incorporates the works of Romantic and Victorian writers into a comprehensive investigation of blood and poetry that follows the history of medical ideas from the 1790s to the 1860s. Specifically, this dissertation addresses historical discourses of neurophysiology, gynecology, surgery, and experimental physiology and shows how blood was understood to participate in a range of physiological processes: cerebral circulation, respiration, menstruation, inflammation, and arousal. Theories of bodily economy, in which the blood is conceived as a finite resource, and therapeutic methods of blood regulation are especially important to Vascular Aesthetics. The argument demonstrates how blood circulates as both a vital and dangerous force through the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Barrett Browning, and Swinburne, linking the familiar features of their poetry—Wordsworth’s growth of the mind, Keats’s pathological desire, Barrett Browning’s proto-feminism, and Swinburne’s sadomasochism—to a more corporeal, vascular vision of embodied subjectivity.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations 1

Introduction 2

“Kindred Stream”: Wordsworth’s Blood-Based Mind 17

“A Turbulence of Blood and Brain”: Menstrual Economy and Poetic Pubescence in Aurora Leigh 56

Hot Blooded: Inflammation and Arousal in Keats’s Erotic Poetry 101

Sanguinary Experiments: Swinburne and Vivisection 152

Works Cited 196

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	History of Science Literature, English
Parola chiave	Physiology Victorian Nineteenth century Blood Literature and medicine Poetry British literature Romanticism
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Deborah Elise White, Emory University
Committee Members	Laura Otis, Emory University Paul Kelleher, Emory University

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