Description
Book SynopsisAn original study of late Enlightenment aesthetics, poetics, and environmental medicine as overlapping ways of comprehending the dislocations of historical existence lodged in the movements of bodies and minds
Trade ReviewWinner of the 2022 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, sponsored by the International Conference on Romanticism
Shortlisted for the Marilyn Gaull Award from The Wordsworth Circle
“In tracing how eighteenth-century pathology and aesthetics registered causal forces beyond our immediate ken, Kevis Goodman offers an electrifying account of the way poetics made abstract historical processes visible at a pivotal moment in global modernity.”—Lynn Festa, author of
Fiction Without Humanity“Goodman provides a new way of thinking about human freedom, the imagination, volition, and mobility. This is a richly erudite and theoretically lucid book that anyone working in this period will want to read and reread.”—Alan Bewell, University of Toronto
“By bringing together aesthetics and medicine, Goodman offers a new and enthralling description of modernity.
Pathologies of Motion also brilliantly vindicates, as it demonstrates, the practice of symptomatic reading.”—Deidre Lynch, Harvard University
“Goodman’s elegant, learned work is the entering wedge in a radical rethinking of Romanticism and its predecessors. It reveals a pathological counter-current in tension with the age’s dominant aesthetic quest for harmony.”—Marjorie Levinson, author of
Thinking through Poetry “Goodman rediscovers eighteenth-century pathology as a synoptic discipline projecting the material body and the imagination as mutually involved and evolving agents of human behavior and consciousness. Her book thereby offers exciting new readings of reading itself—of the physiological functions of organized sound—as well as of Schiller and the Scottish doctors, of the newly privileged phenomenon of nostalgia, and of some of the best-known Romantic poems.”—David Simpson, author of
Engaging Violence
