Examining various aesthetics of suspension in the works of nineteenth-century poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, Anne C. McCarthy shares important insights into the cultural fascination with the sublime.

Anne C. McCarthy is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Pennsylvania State University.

"Awful Parenthesis provides beautiful close readings of a range of poems, including an extended reading of Shelley’s Mont Blanc (1816). But this book’s most important contribution is not its treatment of particular poems or poets, but rather its moving […] consideration of the way life is lived in the face of contingency, and of the leap of faith such living requires."

Kimberly Rodda, University of Toronto:

"Awful Parenthesis presents a convincing case for re-theorizing the sublime by recognizing suspension as its condition of possibility."

Emma Mason, University of Warwick:

"An outstanding book that hospitably accommodates the reader in its complexity and nuance even as it entertains with its elegant, shrewd, and frequently quick-witted exegeses of form."

Deborah Weiss, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa:

"Awful Parenthesis is both ambitious and promising. It focuses and allows us to take a step forward in writing the history of an aesthetic that numerous studies see as pushing toward the future, something that reveals in the Romantics the seeds of the post-modern, perhaps the post-human."

Sasha Tamar Strelitz:

"By carefully analyzing suspension, with its ‘constellation of meanings and images that gradually – if only through insistent repetition – take on increasingly general force' in the Romantic and early Victorian eras’, McCarthy considerably contributes to the overwhelming body of secondary scholarship on Romantic and Victorian literature."

Monique Morgan, Associate Professor, Department of English, Indiana University Bloomington:

"Awful Parenthesis offers an important, interesting addition to the fields of Romantic and Victorian literature, and contributes to renewed interest in Victorian poetry and in poetic form. Tying together an intriguing mixture of highly canonical works and lesser-known texts, Awful Parenthesis will have a strong appeal to faculty and graduate students working on Romanticism, Victorian literature, and poetry more broadly."

Christopher Stokes, Lecturer, Department of Humanities, University of Exeter:

"Awful Parenthesis is elegantly written, well-researched, thoroughly prepared, and up-to-date on existing scholarship."