Swoon

<p><i>Swoon</i> is the first extensive study of literary swooning homing in on swooning's rich history as well as its potential to provide new insights into the contemporary. <br><br>This study demonstrates that passing-out has had a pivotal place in English literature. Beginning with an introduction to the swoon as a marker of aesthetic sensitivity it includes chapters on swooning and generic transformation in Chaucer and Shakespeare; morbid femininised swoons and excessive affect in romantic gothic and modernist works; irony cliché and bathos in the swoons of contemporary romance fiction. This book revisits key texts to show that passing-out has been intimately connected to explorations of emotionality ecstasy and transformation; to depictions of sickness and dying; and to performances of gender and gendering. <i>Swoon</i> offers an exciting new approach the history of the body alongside the history of literary response.</p>