[l]ike an unbodied joy whose race is just begun». Competing with the soaring bird as he had done with the eponymous west wind, Shelley is sorely disappointed by the fact that his body prevents him from joining the bird and the wind, and that a «heavy weight of hours» has chained him to the ground and the corporeality of the human condition. In his «Ode to the Nightingale», the fretful and consumptive Keats dispenses with any Icarian aspirations and wishes only that he could «leave the world unseen» and «fade away» with the invisible nightingale into the realm of fantasy. From these two poems, it seems clear that Romantic poets define the body in terms of a burden: a dungeon incarcerating the volatile mind. Whilst Thomas Hardy in his poem «Shelley’s Skylark» (1887) savagely criticises the Romantics’ disregard for the body and shows the bird for what it is, a little «ball of feather and bone», it must not be overlooked that the process of re-embodiment, man’s awareness of being «an embodied conundrum», started not so much with the Victorians (as in Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend), as with the Romantics them­selves. Whilst Keats longed to fade away and see his feverish body dissolve into nothingness (in consequence of which the poem «To Autumn» discards all references to human beings and bodies), his lingu­istic sensuality can clearly be understood as a potent effort to re-embody language and counter Shelley’s (futile) aspirations to make language diaphanous and an adequate vehicle for his idea of intellectual beauty. Contrary to all expectations, as well as to the 18^th-century habit of highlighting the filthy and bestial aspects of the body, the Romantic age thus re-discovers the body and reclaims it from its mar­ginalised and taboo position. It is to Keats’s merit that he releases melancholy from its brooding self-centredness and sees it as a gift that enables the poet to enjoy his mistress’s physical beauty and «feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes». Lord Byron, an extremely harsh critic of Keats’s poetry, goes one step further when, in his monumental poem Don Juan (1818-24), he not only re-introduces the body in all its Swiftian connotations, but also divests Romantic poetry of its oppressive Platonic garb. In the same sensual manner as that in which Keats’s speaker emprisons his mistress’s hand, young Don Juan ignores the Platonic traditions and, by squeezing Donna Julia’s hand, reveals that all discourses of disembodied amour courtois in the wake of Petrarch are a hoax. Disparaging Plato as a «charlatan» and Petrarch as the «Platonic pimp of all posterity» Byron underscores the fact that the age of Romanticism is not a monolithic movement and that his deconstruction of Plato is conducive to a strong anti-Lakist wave of Romantic re-embodiments which culminate in graphic depictions of slaughter, canni­balism and sexual intercourse. In this respect, the age of Romanticism resembles the age of Shakespeare, which the Roman­tics helped to redefine. Struggling to free themselves from Petrarch’s Platonic idiom, Shakespeare and his contemporaries invested their works with an unprecedented corporeality that only Puritan fundamentalism was able to stifle. Whilst Byron more often than not re­verts to Shakespeare to give his bodily and erotic language a canonical underpinning, other Romantics (such as Coleridge) re-interpret the Elizabethan dramatist in terms of disembodied philosophy, «Romantic brain science», or – in the light of the emergence of Evangelicalism – reduce Shakespeare to a torso, which proved palatable to the avid readers of Bowlder’s Family Shakespeare (1820). As in Shakespeare’s times, the Romantic age is thus characterised by a clash of different concepts of the body, by discourses running the gamut from anti-corporeality to provocative and aggressive re-embodiment, showing that the images of the Romantic body are as elusive as the period that generated them. Within this frame, the present volume aims to investigate the usage and conception of the body in the Romantic period. We have tried to keep the focus open to both the decades immediately preceding the Romantic age strictu sensu – the exploration of corporeality in the second half of the 18^th century – and those following it up to the later 19^th century, when perspectives on the body would be affected by increasingly relevant racial debate and the impact of Darwin’s theories. We have tried to include as many critical approaches as possible, hosting contributions from both established and young or independent scholars. Some of the contributions in the main section – such as those of Lisa Ann Robertson, Rocco Coronato, and Norbert Lennartz – provide the reader with an insight into the main scientific and cultural debates concerning the mind/body relationship, as well as a discussion of the way Romantic and pre-Romantic literature helped to redefine older concepts of the body. The essays of Eliza O’Brien, Linda Claridge Middup, Sharon Ruston, Caroline Kimberly, Evy Varsamopoulou and Michael Bradshaw, on the other hand, focus more closely on the reception and treatment of the body and its anatomy in both classic and less known/studied works. The Marginalia section is dedicated to contributions that either widen the scope of the analysis to contexts other than the British (Barnaba Maj’s essay on Georg Büchner, as well as Stephanie Saint’s essay on Herman Melville), or propose an investigation into the later years of the 19^th century (Tiziana Morosetti’s contribution on the racial debate between Italy and Great Britain). Finally, in the Poet’s Corner we have chosen to include (rather than the usual presentation of previously unpublished creative writing) some selected representative extracts from such relevant thinkers as David Hartley, James Cowles Prichard, William Lawrence and Robert Knox, whose work was central in the forging of 18^th– and 19^th-century perspectives on the body. A key text in the shaping of an exquisitely British conception of the body and its anatomy, David Hartley’s Observations (1749) is explored in the opening essay of the volume, Robertson’s «Soulful Sensorium», which investigates the impact of Hartley’s work on Joseph Priestley (Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, 1777), as well as how they discussed traditional Christian and neo-Platonic views of the body. The cultural heritage of the 18^th century also underlies Rocco Coronato’s essay, which, through a discussion of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and an increasing fascination with automata, explores both the concept of sentiment and the mechanistic view of the body in pre-Romantic England. To Romantic literature more strictly, on the other hand, is dedicated the essay «Porous Bodies in British Romantic Literature», in which Lennartz, focusing on authors as diverse as Byron, Keats and Matthew Lewis, discusses the way Romantic literature dealt with the ‘porousness’ of the feminised body, at once inheriting and challenging previous gender concepts. Realting more closely to British Romantic literature in its various expressions, O’Brien’s analysis of Caleb Williams proposes an effective insight into the employment of the body as evidence in the early Romantic period, as well as into Godwin’s conception of judgement. To Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts and Maria Edgeworth’s Rosamond and to their representation of the feminine body more specifically, is dedicated Middup’s «Body vs Soul», in which the relation between body and mind is once more central. Frankestein,on the other hand, is explored by Ruston in her essay through an investigation into the the language of natural history employed in the novel, as well as into the classification of the Creature, looking more closely at the impact of physicians such as Blumenbach, Buffon and Lawrence on the literary landscape. Kimberly’s «Endymion and the Critics» focuses on the conception of both class and gender in Keats’s work, exploring his representation of the body and masculinity in Endymion through the lens of later criticism of the poem. Pain, and starvation more specifically, are at the core of Varsamopoulou’s essay, which investigates the limits to which the body is led in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, as well as their relation to autobiographical discourse. Bradshaw’s «Thomas Hood and the Art of the Leg-Pull» still focuses on pain, but with a look at deformity and disability, and the author re-evaluates Hood’s works in light of body criticism, disability studies and theories of laughter, discussing the relation between pain and the comic genre. The contributions included in the main section of this issue of La Questione Romantica are therefore meant to offer an overview on the body and its employment/reinterpretation in the context of British Romanticism. Although generally shorter than those included in the main section, the essays presented in the Marginalia section are equally relevant, given the importance of the debate on the body outside Great Britain, as well as the impact of the Romantic conception of the body on later cultural and literary developments. Maj’s essay on Georg Büchner focuses on the bodily dimensions of the suffering of the the people, exploring such an undervalued piece as the political manifesto Der Hessische Landobte (The Hessian Messenger), in which the German author addresses the peasants of his country. Saint’s contribution on Melville’s Redburn, through an investigation of the employment of physical disability in the novel, points on the other hand to Melville’s challenging Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in his portrait of Liverpool’s dock-wall beggars. Finally, Tiziana Morosetti’s «A War between Races» explores the way the claim of a biological specificity of Italians in the late 19th century led to the reinforcement, in the British context, of stereotypes on the Italian ‘body’ that first the Renaissance, and later Romanticism had nurtured. The portrait of the body that arises from these essays is in no way homogenous, but rather proves how flexible, evocative, as well as rich in allusion the employment of the body has been in the context of British Romanticism.

This issue of La Questione Romantica is edited by Tiziana Morosetti and Norbert Lennartz.