Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse

Download or read book Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse written by Anne DeLong and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity explores the connections among the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa. This analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the works of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) contributes to recent scholarship about improvisational poetics, the subversive potential of mesmerism, and Medusa as a feminist icon.