Romantic-era literature offers a key message: surveillance, in all its forms, was experienced distinctly and differently by women than men. Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period examines how familiar and neglected texts internalise and interrogate the ways in which targeted, asymmetric, and often isolating surveillance made women increasingly and uncomfortably visible in a way that still resonates today. The book combines the insights of modern surveillance studies with Romantic scholarship. It provides readers with a new context in which to understand Romantic-period texts and looks critically at emerging paradigms of surveillance directed at marginal groups, as well as resistance to such monitoring. Works by writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and Joanna Baillie, as well as Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey, give a new perspective on the age that produced the Panopticon. This book is designed to appeal to a wide readership, and is aimed at students and scholars of surveillance, literature, Romanticism, and gender politics, as well as those interested in important strands of women’s experience not only for the additional layers they reveal about the Romantic era but also for their relevance to current debates around asymmetries of power within gendered surveillance.

"Romantic-era literature offers a key message: surveillance, in all its forms, was experienced distinctly and differently by women than men. Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period examines how familiar and neglected texts internalise and interrogate the ways in which targeted, asymmetric, and often isolating surveillance made women increasingly and uncomfortably visible in a way that still resonates today. The book combines the insights of modern Surveillance Studies with Romantic scholarship. It provides readers with a new context in which to understand Romantic-period texts and looks critically at emerging paradigms of surveillance directed at marginal groups, as well as resistance to such monitoring. Works by writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and Joanna Baillie, as well as Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey give a new perspective on the age that produced the Panopticon. This book is designed to appeal to a wide readership, and is aimed at students and scholars of surveillance, literature, Romanticism, and gender politics, as well as those interested in important strands of women's experience not only for the additional layers they reveal about the Romantic era but also for their relevance to current debates around asymmetries of power within gendered surveillance"--

Digital surveillance is a daily and all-encompassing reality of life in China. This book explores how Chinese citizens make sense of digital surveillance and live with it. It investigates their imaginaries about surveillance and privacy from within the Chinese socio-political system. Based on in-depth qualitative research interviews, detailed diary notes, and extensive documentation, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre attempts to ‘de-Westernise’ the internet and surveillance literature. She shows how the research participants weave a cohesive system of anguishing narratives on China’s moral shortcomings and redeeming narratives on the government and technology as civilising forces. Although many participants cast digital surveillance as indispensable in China, their misgivings, objections, and the mental tactics they employ to dissociate themselves from surveillance convey the mental and emotional weight associated with such surveillance exposure. The book is intended for academics and students in internet, surveillance, and Chinese studies, and those working on China in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, social psychology, psychology, communication, computer sciences, contemporary history, and political sciences. The lay public interested in the implications of technology in daily life or in contemporary China will find it accessible as it synthesises the work of sinologists and offers many interview excerpts.

This book examines how CCTV cameras expose the patient body inside the mental health ward, especially the relationship between staff and patients as surveillance subjects. A key aspect of the book is that existing surveillance literature and mental health literature have largely ignored the influence of CCTV cameras on patient and staff experiences inside mental health wards. Research findings for this book suggest that camera use inside mental health wards is based on a perception of the violent nature of the mental health patient. This perception not only influences ethical mental health practice inside the ward but also impacts how patients experience the ward. It is not known how and why CCTV camera use has expanded to its uses inside mental health wards. These include not only communal areas of the ward but also patient bedrooms. The research, therefore, examines how and why camera technology was introduced inside three Psychiatric Intensive Care Mental Health Units located in England, UK. Aimed at both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book will appeal to sociology, mental health, and surveillance studies students, as well as practitioners in mental health nursing, caseworkers and social caregivers.

Taking twenty women writers of the Romantic period, Romanticism and Gender explores a neglected period of the female literary tradition, and for the first time gives a broad overview of Romantic literature from a feminist perspective.

Arguing that vision was the dominant mode for understanding suffering in the Romantic era, Elizabeth A. Dolan shows that Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley experimented with aesthetic and scientific visual methods in order to expose the social structures underlying suffering. Dolan's exploration of illness, healing, and social justice in the writings of these three authors depends on two major questions: How do women writers' innovations in literary form make visible previously unseen suffering? And, how do women authors portray embodied vision to claim literary authority? Dolan's research encompasses a wide range of primary sources in science and medicine, including nosology, health travel, botany, and ophthalmology, allowing her to map the resonances and disjunctions between medical theory and literature. This in turn points towards a revisioning of enduring themes in Romanticism such as the figure of the Romantic poet, the relationship between the mind and nature, sensibility and sympathy, solitude and sociability, landscape aesthetics, the reform novel, and Romantic-era science. Dolan's book is distinguished by its deep engagement with several disciplines and genres, making it a key text for understanding Romanticism, the history of medicine, and the position of the woman writer during the period.

Combining queer theory with theories of affect, psychoanalysis, and Foucauldian genealogy, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini theorizes performative melancholia, a condition where, regardless of sexual orientation, overinvestment in gender norms causes subjects who are unable to embody those norms to experience socially expected (‘normal’) gender as something unattainable or lost. This perceived loss causes an ambivalence within the subject that can lead to self-inflicted violence (masochism, suicide) or violence toward others (sadism, murder). Reading a range of Romantic poetry and novels between 1790-1820, but ultimately moving beyond the period to show its contemporary cultural relevance through readings of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, and George Sodini’s 2009 murder-suicide case, this study argues that we need to move beyond focusing on bullying, teens, and LGBT students and look at our cultural investment in gender normativity itself. Doing so allows us to recognize that the relationship between non-normative gender performance and violence is not simply a gay problem; it is a human problem that can affect people of any sex, sexuality, age, race, or ethnicity and one that we can trace back to the Romantic period. Bringing late 18th-century novels into conversation with both canonical and lesser-known Romantic poetry, allows us to see that, as people whose performance of gender occasionally exceeds the normal, we too often internalize these norms and punish ourselves or others for our inability to adhere to them. Contrasting paired chapters by male and female authors and including sections on failed romantic coupling, melancholic femininities, melancholic masculinities, failed gender performance and madness, and ending with a section titled After Romanticism, this study works on multiple levels to complicate previous understandings of gender and violence in Romanticism while also offering a model for contemporary issues relating to gender and violence among people who ‘fail’ to perform gender according to social norms.