Pathologies of Motion

Kevis Goodman is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to published essays and edited collections, she is the author of Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History.

“Excellent . . . a tour-de-force.”—Arden Hegele, British Association for Romanticism Studies ReviewWinner of the 2022 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, sponsored by the International Conference on RomanticismShortlisted for the Marilyn Gaull Award from The Wordsworth CircleHonorable Mention from the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, sponsored by The Society for Literature, Science, and the ArtsShortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, sponsored by The Indiana U Center for Eighteenth-Century StudiesWinner of the 2025 Robert Lowry Patten Award, sponsored by Rice University“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