The Cambridge Companion to Women's Writing in the Romantic Period


Book Description

A wide-ranging and accessible account of the pioneering professional women writers who flourished during the Romantic period.




Re-Visioning Romanticism


Book Description

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995




British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community


Book Description

Approaching the work of Romantic-era British women poets through the lenses of public radicalism, war, and poetic form. This compelling study recovers the lost lives and poems of British women poets of the Romantic era. Stephen C. Behrendt reveals the range and diversity of their writings, offering new perspectives on the work of dozens of women whose poetry has long been ignored or marginalized in traditional literary history. British Romanticism was once thought of as a cultural movement defined by a small group of male poets. This book grants women poets their proper place in the literary tradition of the time. In an approach ripe for classroom teaching, Behrendt first reviews the subject thematically, exploring the ways in which the poems addressed both public concerns and private experiences. He next examines the use of particular genres, including the sonnet and various other long and short forms. In the concluding chapters, Behrendt explores the impact of national identity, providing the first extensive study of Romantic-era poetry by women from Scotland and Ireland. In recovering the lives and work of these women, Behrendt reveals their active participation within the rich cultural community of writers and readers throughout the British Isles. This study will be a key resource for scholars, teachers, and students in British literary studies, women’s studies, and cultural history.




Women's Writing of the Victorian Period 1837-1901


Book Description

This ground-breaking anthology brings together a wide selection of women's writings from the Victorian period (excluding fiction and drama), most of which cannot be easily found elsewhere. There are writings from more than 60 authors covering a broad range of public and private genres from the period including poetry, critical essays, biography, travel literature, political commentary, letters, diaries and journals, and care has been taken to balance extracts and complete texts.




Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age


Book Description

This book examines the writings of seven English women economists from the period 1735–1811. It reveals that contrary to what standard accounts of the history of economic thought suggest, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women intellectuals were undertaking incisive and gender-sensitive analyses of the economy. Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age argues that established notions of what constitutes economic enquiry, topics, and genres of writing have for centuries marginalised the perspectives and experiences of women and obscured the knowledge they recorded in novels, memoirs, or pamphlets. This has led to an underrepresentation of women in the canon of economic theory. Using insights from literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and feminist economics, the book develops a transdisciplinary methodology that redresses this imbalance and problematises the distinction between literary and economic texts. In its in-depth readings of selected writings by Sarah Chapone, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Priscilla Wakefield, Mary Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen, this book uncovers the originality and topicality of their insights on the economics of marriage, women and paid work, and moral economics. Combining historical analysis with conceptual revision, Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age retrieves women’s overlooked intellectual contributions and radically breaks down the barriers between literature and economics. It will be of interest to researchers and students from across the humanities and social sciences, in particular the history of economic thought, English literary and cultural studies, gender studies, economics, eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, social history, and the history of ideas.




Women in Romanticism


Book Description

What did it mean to write as a woman in the Romantic era? How did women writers test and refashion the claims or the grand self, the central 'I, ' we typically see in Romanticism? In this powerful and original study Meena Alexander examines the work of three women: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) the radical feminist who typically thought of life as 'warfare' and revolted against the social condition of women; Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) who lived a private life enclosed by the bonds of femininity, under the protection of her poet brother William and his family; Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter that Wollstonecraft died giving birth to, mistress then wife of the poet Percy Shelley, and precocious author of Frankenstein. Contents: Introduction: Mapping a Female Romanticism; Romantic Feminine; True Appearances; Of Mothers and Mamas; Writing in Fragments; Natural Enclosures; Unnatural Creation; Revising the Feminine; Versions of the Sublime R




Women Writers in the Romantic Age


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Romanticism in the Light of Cultural Studies, language: English, abstract: The time of Romanticism is historically regarded as a masculine phenomenon. As Anne K. Mellor pointed out, Romanticism as a literary movement was constructed and defined by a masculine discourse and ideology, a “masculine Romanticism”. This masculine Romanticism is the traditional understanding of the literary movement – based on the writings and thoughts of the five canonical writers Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Mellor suggests that “feminine Romanticism” occurs to recover the erased and neglected voices of women writers within this movement. To understand these differences of masculine and feminine Romanticism, one has to realize that both terms serve as an ideological gender construction, not in terms of the author ́s sex. To analyse female romantic literature also means to consider the division of ́private ́ and ́public ́ sphere occuring in the eighteenth century, a phenomenon that should be discussed in the following chapter. This paper aims to show how women writers could made a career in the male-dominated time of Romanticism. In order to show the problems they experienced within a patriarchal society, I will explore the subordination of women by a construction of femininity which did not grant them the status of rational thinking subjects. For this purpose I have chosen the example of Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary founder of feminism. Wollstonecraft was not only a writer herself, but she was also the wife of the well-known political philosopher, William Godwin, and she gave birth to Mary Godwin Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein. As a member of the literary circle around Joseph Johnson, she was surrounded by famous contemporary writers and was involved in literary relationships within her own family circle.




Dreaming in Books


Book Description

Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book's identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book's rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age."--Pub. desc.




Women Writers in the Romantic Age


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Romanticism in the Light of Cultural Studies, language: English, abstract: The time of Romanticism is historically regarded as a masculine phenomenon. As Anne K. Mellor pointed out, Romanticism as a literary movement was constructed and defined by a masculine discourse and ideology, a "masculine Romanticism". This masculine Romanticism is the traditional understanding of the literary movement - based on the writings and thoughts of the five canonical writers Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Mellor suggests that "feminine Romanticism" occurs to recover the erased and neglected voices of women writers within this movement. To understand these differences of masculine and feminine Romanticism, one has to realize that both terms serve as an ideological gender construction, not in terms of the author ́s sex. To analyse female romantic literature also means to consider the division of ́private ́ and ́public ́ sphere occuring in the eighteenth century, a phenomenon that should be discussed in the following chapter. This paper aims to show how women writers could made a career in the male-dominated time of Romanticism. In order to show the problems they experienced within a patriarchal society, I will explore the subordination of women by a construction of femininity which did not grant them the status of rational thinking subjects. For this purpose I have chosen the example of Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary founder of feminism. Wollstonecraft was not only a writer herself, but she was also the wife of the well-known political philosopher, William Godwin, and she gave birth to Mary Godwin Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein. As a member of the literary circle around Joseph Johnson, she was surrounded by famous contemporary writers and was involved in literary relationships withi




Romanticism and Women Poets


Book Description

One of the most exciting developments in Romantic studies in the past decade has been the rediscovery and repositioning of women poets as vital and influential members of the Romantic literary community. This is the first volume to focus on women poets of this era and to consider how their historical reception challenges current conceptions of Romanticism. With a broad, revisionist view, the essays examine the poetry these women produced, what the poets thought about themselves and their place in the contemporary literary scene, and what the recovery of their works says about current and past theoretical frameworks. The contributors focus their attention on such poets as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Mary Lamb, and Fanny Kemble and argue for a significant rethinking of Romanticism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon. Grounding their consideration of the poets in cultural, social, intellectual, and aesthetic concerns, the authors contest the received wisdom about Romantic poetry, its authors, its themes, and its audiences. Some of the essays examine the ways in which many of the poets sought to establish stable positions and identities for themselves, while others address the changing nature over time of the reputations of these women poets.