Article Title：British Romantic melancholia - Charlotte Smith's 'Elegiac Sonnets', medical discourse and the problem of sensibility
Abstract：
In the context of increasing British discomfort with the cult of sensibility in the 1790s, medical writers redefined the profile of the melancholic as a highly rational, rather than emotional, literary man. Charlotte Smith's representation of melancholia in her Elegiac Sonnets returns to the mid-eighteenth-century understanding of the illness, which portrayed the melancholic as a person of both sensibility and rationality. In her attempt to claim melancholia and its association with literary genius, Smith profoundly influenced the content of what was to be called Romantic poetry.
Keywords: Charlotte Smith; medicine and literature; melancholia; Romanticism; sensibility
DOI: 10.1177/0047244103040416
Source：JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES
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