Richard C. Sha's revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha's innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity-or purposelessness-became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

An impressive display of Sha's masterful grasp of a wide range of scholarly literature, and a provocative thesis that will be of interest to academics in all three fields. -- Katie Gray H-Net Reviews 2009 Sha brings to these topics a keen intelligence buttressed by up-to-the-minute scholarship... He dazzles by the quantity and breadth of his reading and embodies the best interdisciplinary approaches so many scholars tout but rarely incorporate. -- George Rousseau Social History of Medicine 2010 His theoretical insights come together with acute readings and strong historical research. Times Literary Supplement 2010 Richard C. Sha's fine study takes Byron's theme of 'perversion' in a different direction from the ethical, demonstrating how Romantic medical writing about the perverse influenced literary Romanticism... Fascinating book. Byron Journal 2010 Stunningly brilliant and original... a distinguished work that is well worth reading. -- Geraldine Friedman Review of English Studies 2010 Strong scholarship. -- Myron D. Yeager ANQ 2010

Richard C. Sha is a professor of literature at American University and author of The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism.