Creating Romantic Obsession

Kathleen Béres Rogers is an Associate Professor of English at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA.

• 1. Introduction: Scorpions in the Mind.- 2. Vigilia and the Science of the Mind in William Godwin's Caleb Williams and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, or Memories of a Sleepwalker.- 3. Intellectual Monomania and Enthusiasm in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mary Hays's Memoirs of Emma Courtney.- 4. The Stings of Love: Erotomania and Nymphomania in John Keats's Isabella, or The Pot of Basil and Charlotte Dacre's The Passions.- 5. Revolutiana and the Sublime in George Gleig's Subaltern, Lord Byron's Siege of Corinth, and Joanna Baillie's Count Basil.- 6. Ideality and Art in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Edgar Allen Poe's "Berenice" and "The Tell-Tale Heart".- 7. Coda: From Scorpions to Spiders, A.S. Byatt's Possession.

“Rogers has woven a brilliant account of how Romantic obsession and resultant madness are not merely psychological phenomena, which, given the breadth of the scholarship here, would represent a misreading of the period, but embodied, pathologized, medicalized events. … She has opened up new seams of inquiry, notably in texts she does not even mention in her book … these and other texts should be re-examined in light of Rogers’s work.” (Jeffrey Cass, European Romantic Review, January 27, 2022)