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.

Foreword; D.Gigante Introduction; M.Faubert  & T.H.Schmid Byron, Polidori, and the Epistemology of Romantic Pleasure; R.C.Sha Pleasure in an Age of Talkers: Keats's Material Sublime;  B.Winakur Tontiplaphol 'Was it for this?': Romantic Psychiatry and the Addictive Pleasures of Moral Management; J.Faflak John Ferriar's Psychology, James Hogg's Justified Sinner, and the Gay Science of Horror-Writing; M.Faubert 'It is a path I have prayed to follow': The Paradoxical Pleasures of Romantic Disease; C.Lawlor Taking A Trip Into China: The Uneasy Pleasures of Colonialist Space in Mansfield Park; J.Cass Exhausted Appetites, Vitiated Tastes: Romanticism, Mass Culture and the Pleasures of Consumption; S.Webb 'Diminished Impressibility': Addiction, Neuroadaptation and Pleasure in Coleridge; T.H.Schmid Nature, Ideology, and the Prohibition of Pleasure in Blake's 'Garden of Love'; K.Hutchings

THOMAS H. SCHMID Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA.

MICHELLE FAUBERT Associate Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Manitoba, Canada.