ABSTRACT
What has emerged over the course of this book is evidence of a culture that recognised its own registration of a remarkably complex specular gaze – a culture that rendered women’s bodies significant on multiple levels: as ‘spectacles’ to be stared at, to be scrutinised and contained, as well as to be sexualised. But this surveillance culture is not limited to the texts covered by Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period; we need to expand our investigations to explore the hypervisibility of the body with disability, for example – to continue to examine how people searched for and inspected the ‘abnormal’ in women’s bodily configurations during the Romantic era, as well as consider how (if at all) women resisted these surveillant mechanisms.
