Silvia Riccardi, Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art, and the Body, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 242 pp. £109.99 Hb, ISBN 978-3-031-64364-4
Silvia Riccardi’s Dark Romanticism: Literature, Art and the Body brings together elements of the visual, literary, and scientific in a beautifully illustrated and incredibly detailed volume. Throughout the work, Riccardi presents a fascinating interplay between the literary and the medical, and also between the aesthetic and the artistic, when looking at a mixture of text, engraving, and painting. By bringing a variety of mediums to the forefront, she demonstrates the importance of the concept of dark Romanticism and explores areas that can often be overlooked in Romantic studies. Due to the importance of the visual throughout the text, it is filled with a beautiful selection of illustrations that are essential to the message throughout but also make it striking to read. She also draws out the visual in the written word with startling lucidity, making Dark Romanticism an immersive and persuasive read.
Chapter one, ‘Darkness Visible,’ describes the myriad of ways in which the body, specifically the body in pain, ‘becomes a controversial source of aesthetic pleasure’ across the Romantic period and specifically in the works of Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Mary Shelley (28). Chapter one works in lieu of an introduction and clearly lays out the format and goals of the book as to ‘move beyond the classification of genres and to further an understanding of dark Romanticism as primarily aesthetic and encompassing both literary and visual forms,’ a goal that Riccardi achieves through a thorough explanation of some of the key art and literature of the broad category of dark Romanticism (3). Riccardi engages closely with the scientific culture of the period, including botanical and anatomical work, medicine, and pseudo-sciences such as physiognomy. She describes these artists and writers as ‘grappling with the very elements that are key to the material notion of human form’ (4). It is this particular ambiguity that creates the anxieties upon which Dark Romanticism draws its focus.
In the following chapter, ‘Fuseli’s Bodies in Agony,’ Riccardi explains how Dante’s Commedia offered Henry Fuseli a ‘subject matter to graphically explore distortions and exaggerated qualities’ and transcend the limits of the ideal classical form (46). Throughout, she demonstrates how Fuseli creates a disintegrated body, wherein ‘every muscle is over-marked, the inner tissues become visible’ (47). Fuseli’s utilisation of Burkean ideas of the sublime is clear in his depictions of the circle of the lustful, and through a carefully chosen and closely analysed selection of his artistic work, Riccardi demonstrates the interactions between form and material, and shows how these constraints shape Fuseli’s approach to the body and to art, and how this relates to dark Romanticism as a broader category.
Both chapters three and four examine William Blake’s work as an engraver, of both illuminated manuscripts and classics – returning again to Dante’s Commedia – and shows how this work demonstrates the constraints and freedoms of form and material. It illustrates how these constraints, or freedoms, work to create his unique approach to the transcended body. Chapter three, ‘Blake’s Biomorphism,’ opens with a comprehensive explanation of the position Blake’s work has held in critical work regarding his conceptions of the natural world, and our conceptions of green Romanticism. The chapter moves on to answer the previously unexplored question of how the ‘practice and art of engraving affected [Blake’s] vision of the natural world’ (90). Blake utilises human forms to represent plant life, and plant-like aspects to render humanity; through combining ‘words and images, humans, animals and plants, in one single body, the artist overcomes the causality that to be in nature is merely to materialise’ (95). For Blake, it is precisely this tactile medium of engraving that allowed a creation of lines and patterns resembling ‘forms of the human and vegetative realm;’ this biomorphism degrades the boundaries between plant and animal life through patterns of ‘veins, tendons, blood vessels, and hair,’ that resemble ‘roots, tendrils, foliage, and branches’ (108). Through both his engravings and his poetry, Blake brings together the vegetative and the human through anatomical comparisons between a grape vine and the human nervous system. The juxtaposition of the animal and plant part is displayed on the illustrated page of Blake’s ‘America a Prophecy,’ across which the entangled fibres of the nerves and the entangled vines of the grape are interwoven. Riccardi stresses the relationship between ‘humans and plants, word and image’ as a symbiotic one that is fostered through Blake’s unique position as an engraver, poet, and painter (126).
Riccardi closes chapter three with a succinct summary of the argument of the following chapter, describing how Blake used opacity and translucence when encountering Dante, and depicting the ambiguous threshold between life and death. Chapter four, ‘The Body in the Line,’ demonstrates how artists can utilise form and material to reveal ‘a point of access into the experience of the beyond’ (29). Through close examination of the bodies Blake portrays within Dante’s Inferno, Riccardi demonstrates how expanded perception is translated into the work of the engraver through Blake’s command of graphic lines. The fluidity of being that is present within Dante’s Commedia relates to the common thread throughout Dark Romanticism of bodies in between these points of life, death, and beyond.
In the fifth chapter, ‘In the Eye of the Monster,’ Riccardi discusses how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ‘engages with medical speculations on the body through the very anatomies it presents’ (171). Frankenstein plays with the ambiguity between the boundaries of life and death that were emerging at the time due to scientific experiments such as Galvanism; ‘life and death,’ Riccardi states, ‘were not considered to be binary states of existence’ (172). The narrative explores the ambiguous space between life and death that was at the forefront of gothic imagination and medical knowledge during the period. Riccardi argues that it was this ambiguity and instability that saw the human form become seen not simply ‘as a medical object but as an aesthetic one, where the boundaries of beauty and horror become ambiguous’ (172). Victor’s own nervous exhaustion induced by his obsessive commitment to study transforms his living body into one that resembles the deceased; likewise, the creature is alive yet resembles the dead bodies of which he is constructed. Through entwining beauty and horror, Shelley merges the medical and the aesthetic body to explore the intersection between ‘equivocal life and equivocal beauty’ (191). Shelley merges the aesthetic and the literary by inviting readers to ‘imagine [the creature’s] body visually, conflating contemporary medical knowledge on life and death [and] late eighteenth-century aesthetic theories’ (175).
The sixth and final chapter, ‘Broken Beauties,’ opens with Gillray’s satirical print A Cognoscenti contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique (1801) that ‘exposes an irony in the period’s relationship to traditional beauties’ (198). This satire of Sir William Hamilton’s collection ‘represents precisely the reverence for classical wholeness’ that Fuseli, Blake, and Shelley attempt to deliberately subvert (198). In this chapter, Riccardi brings together Fuseli, Blake, and Shelley, and argues that all three ‘crafted their responses to the body and infused it with aesthetic unease’ where ‘fragmentation disrupts tradition’ (208). What brings them together is a shared disruption of ‘classical coherence,’ and an articulation of an ‘artisanal aesthetics of the body that navigates the cultural divide between art and anatomy’ (31). It is their position as liminal figures between the Enlightenment and Romanticism that ‘serves as a crucial historical lens, illuminating the period’s underlying tensions rather than sustaining the normative discourses that obscured them’ (215).
Overall, Riccardi effectively argues for the power of dark Romanticism as an aesthetic form to transcend boundaries between the literary and the artistic, through poetry, prose, engraving and painting. It also transcends the boundaries that seemed of particular interest in the Romantic period, those between beauty and horror, life and death. It demonstrates how these three remarkable and different figures that span the breadth of the period engage with these concepts. Through her work, Riccardi presents a visually stunning and persuasive argument in favour of the importance of dark Romanticism and the intricacies of ‘producing literature and art at a time when aesthetics and empirical knowledge were both sites of fierce intellectual debate, ideological convention, and revolutionary rethinking’ (3).
Lucy Davies
Lancaster University
