Charlotte Smith In British Romanticism

Charlotte Smith's early sonnets established the genre as a Romantic form; her novels advanced sensibility beyond its reliance on emotional facility; and her blank verse initiated one of the most familiar of Romantic verse forms. This volume draws together the best of current scholarship.

Charlotte Smith's early sonnets established the genre as a Romantic form; her novels advanced sensibility beyond its reliance on emotional facility; and her blank verse initiated one of the most familiar of Romantic verse forms. This volume draws together the best of current scholarship.

What is 'Wordsworthian' Romanticism and how did it evolve? This book argues that only by reading Charlotte Smith's poetry in tandem with William Wordsworth's can this question be answered, demonstrating their mutual contribution to the creation of the 'Wordsworthian', through literary analysis and historical contextualizing of their writings.

Immensely popular with contemporary readers, Smith’s major poetic works are foundational texts of the Romantic period. Smith’s innovations in poetic form have also placed her at the forefront of twenty-first-century scholarship on the period. This edition presents her three major poetic works—Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800), The Emigrants (1793), and Beachy Head (1807). While the significance of these three volumes of poetry was recognized in their own time, this edition suggests that they remain major texts for thinking through such questions as the relationship between public and private; the ethical treatment of refugees and other persecuted people; the position of women in a patriarchal society; and the usefulness of science as a way of making sense of a complex and ever-changing world. This Broadview edition includes a new critical introduction that takes into account the developments in scholarship on Smith’s work and women’s writing over the past three decades, and it provides readers with a wealth of contextual material for understanding the writer and the social and literary environment within which she wrote, including key works by her precursors and contemporaries, selections from her letters, and reviews of her poetry.

Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was the author of ten novels, a play, and a host of innovative educational books for children, as well as several volumes of poetry that helped set priorities and determine the tastes of the culture of early Romanticism. Her Elegiac Sonnets sparked the sonnet revival in English Romanticism; The Emigrants initiated its passion for lengthy meditative introspection; and Beachy Head lent its poetic engagement with nature a uniquely telling immediacy. Smith was a woman, Wordsworth remarked a quarter century after her death, "to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered." True to his prediction, Smith's poetry has virtually dropped from sight and thus from cultural consciousness. This, the first edition of Smith's collected poems, will restore to all students of English poetry a distinctive, compelling voice. Likewise, the recovery of Smith to her rightful place among the Romantic poets must spur the reassessment of the place of women writers within that culture.

A lively and far-ranging interest in place, space, and situation characterizes the work of Romantic-era British author Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Featuring ten original essays, an introduction and an epilogue, this volume offers new insights into Smith’s life and work by exploring two central issues: Smith’s place as a foundational writer in her period, and her contribution to the creation of “place” as a concept of social and literary importance. The contributors analyze themes such as itineracy, the natural world, and patriotism; they also explore the position of Smith’s work and authorial identity in terms of genre, aesthetics, and market dynamics. With its innovative approach to place as a material location, symbolic principle, and literary device, this volume advances our understanding of Smith’s work. Placing Charlotte Smith reveals Smith as an author who not only energizes our interest in domestic concerns, but who also shapes a global discourse constituted by changing ideas about borders, travel, national, and international identities.