In this text nine scholars discuss the aesthetics, culture, and science of pleasure in the Romantic period. Richard Sha, Denise Gigante, and Anya Taylor, among others, make a timely contribution to recent debates about issues of pleasure, taste, and appetite by looking anew at the work of figures such as Byron, Coleridge, and Austen.
Introduction / Michelle Faubert and Thomas H. Schmid -- Byron, Polidori, and the epistemology of romantic pleasure / Richard C. Sha -- Pleasure in an age of talkers: Keats's material sublime / Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol -- "Was it for this"?: romantic psychiatry and the addictive pleasures of moral management / Joel Faflak -- John Ferriar's psychology, James Hogg's Justified sinner, and the gay science of horror-writing / Michelle Faubert -- "It is a path I have prayed to follow": the paradoxical pleasures of romantic disease / Clark Lawlor -- Taking a rip into China: the uneasy pleasures of colonialist space in Mansfield Park / Jeffrey Cass -- Exhausted appetites, vitiated tastes: romanticism, mass culture and the pleasures of consumption / Samantha Webb -- Diminished impressibility: addiction, neuroadaptation and pleasure in Coleridge / Thomas H. Schmid -- Nature, ideology, and the prohibition of pleasure in Blake's "Garden of love" / Kevin Hutchings.