Abstract
This chapter explores the causal connection between both the failings of Coleridge’s physical body and his body of work, viewed through the lens of Helen Deutsch’s concept of ‘symptomatic correspondences’, and models of medical rehabilitation described by disability theorists. This analysis demonstrates in Coleridge’s work a refusal to enter the safe, observational discourse of disease: his speakers embrace their own marginalised states, their illnesses, and/or an abundance of feminine sensibility. Goergen’s chapter demonstrates in these writings a willing subjection of both Coleridge himself as author and his poetic speakers to a medical and pathologising gaze. In doing so, Coleridge upsets the ‘natural’ distinctions in gender, race, and bodily ability, as the body of the male author—often explicitly his own body—becomes, at once, a site of unchecked sensibility and of poetic genius that identifies itself as feminine and hysterical, but nonetheless asserts authority over its rational, masculine audience.
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Goergen, C. (2016). ‘Psychological Curiosit[ies]’ from an ‘Intellectual Giant’: Coleridge, Disease, Disability, and Drugs. In: Bradshaw, M. (eds) Disabling Romanticism. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46064-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46064-6_4
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