Of Fears and Bodies in Early Romantic Poetry

This thesis approaches psychophysical expressions of different and changing fears in the Romantic poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This period was chosen because of the immediate and rapid effects of the French Revolution on the formation and perception of the English nation, along with the newfound need to search for meaning that many people felt within a rapidly changing world. The writings of the Romantic poets under question in this thesis, namely William Blake, William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joanna Baillie, and Anne Bannerman, reflect this quest to understand personal and political fears, as well as the coping mechanisms that take fear as a dominant emotion of the times and turn it into a Gothic space for the exploration of personal and political anxieties through Gothic bodies and the interaction between bodies of fear and bodies in fear presented within the spectrum of terror and horror.

More specifically, I will explore the interaction between the self and Gothic bodies of fear in different psychophysical manifestations in a selection of Gothic poetic texts. For these writers, the fears generated through the contact with abject bodies that haunt self and nation can destabilise preconceived ideas of self and society and facilitate healing and re-evaluation. To this end, I will follow contemporary theorisations of varying fears to acknowledge the fact that fear comes in many shapes, degrees, and kinds for these writers, and so do the Gothic bodies that reside in their writings, from Blake’s horror bodies to the spectral bodies that haunt the poetry of Baillie and Bannerman. The importance of fear as an emotion in this context is related to its strong physical impact and its relevance for the contemporary socio-political arena in matters of personal and political threat, safety and control. This thesis will focus on the various responses of early Romantic writers to these anxieties.