Gender Genre And The Romantic Poets

This book offers new insights into the ambiguous masculinity within male romantic poetry, discussing the work of Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge, among others.

Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender focuses on the part played by women poets in the creation of the literary canon in the Romantic period in Britain. Its thirteen essays enrich our panoramic view of an age that is traditionally dominated by male authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Scott. Instead the volume concentrates on the poetical theory and practice of such extraordinary and fascinating women as Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetita Barbauld, Dorothy Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Lady Morgan, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Anna Seward, and Lady Caroline Lamb. Female and male poetics, gender and genres, literary forms and poetic modes are extensively discussed together with the diversity of behaviour and personal responses that the individual women poets offered to their age and provoked in their readers. There have been several important collections of essays in this particular area of study in the last few years, but this volume reflects and complements much of this earlier critical work with specific strengths of its own.

Taking twenty women writers of the Romantic period, Romanticism and Gender explores a neglected period of the female literary tradition, and for the first time gives a broad overview of Romantic literature from a feminist perspective.

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics - English - History of Literature, Eras, grade: 2,0, National University of Ireland, Galway, language: English, abstract: During the last decades feminist literary criticism has increased and also looks back on the past of literary of Romanticism. “The first stage in the feminist consideration was a sustained critique of the ways in which women where represented in poetry of the male Romantic poets in tandem with a consideration of why it was that there were so few women in the canon itself.” (Janowitz, Preface) Regarding this, the question of the importance of gender in understanding Romanticism in general comes up. What kind of role did women play during Romanticism, what did they mean within romantic poetic and who were those few female romantic writer, who did not only write poems but also novels, prose and polemics? “Feminist literary criticism has been a crucial force of the development of what we now more broadly call ‘gender studies’”. (Janowirt, Preface) The present essay is to elaborate the feminist literary criticism and clarify the question about the importance of gender in understanding Romanticism. To do so, I will focus, on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, with a special regard on her prose text Belinda, as well as on the works and the relationship of the Wordsworth’s siblings, and especially the feminine as representation in texts written by William. During the Romantic era, which duration was from 1785, starting quite accurate with Wordworth’s ‘Lyrik Ballads’, to 1832, emotion, feeling, original creation, obsession with nature, and the individual settled in all the art, including writing.

Easily adaptable as both an anthology and an insightful guide to reading and understanding Romantic Poetry, this text discusses the important elements in the works from poets such as Smith, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Barbauld, Byron, Shelley, Hemans, Keats and Landon. Offers a thorough examination of the essential elements of Romantic Poetry Highly selective, the text examines each of its poems in great detail Discusses theme, genre, structure, rhyme, form, imagery, and poetic influence Helpful head notes and annotations provide relevant contextual information and in-depth commentary

Reinventing Romantic Poetry offers a new look at the Russian literary scene in the nineteenth century. While celebrated poets such as Aleksandr Pushkin worked within a male-centered Romantic aesthetic—the poet as a bard or sexual conqueror; nature as a mother or mistress; the poet’s muse as an idealized woman—Russian women attempting to write Romantic poetry found they had to reinvent poetic conventions of the day to express themselves as women and as poets. Comparing the poetry of fourteen men and fourteen women from this period, Diana Greene revives and redefines the women’s writings and offers a thoughtful examination of the sexual politics of reception and literary reputation. The fourteen women considered wrote poetry in every genre, from visions to verse tales, from love lyrics to metaphysical poetry, as well as prose works and plays. Greene delves into the reasons why their writing was dismissed, focusing in particular on the work of Evdokiia Rostopchina, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, and Karolina Pavlova. Greene also considers class as a factor in literary reputation, comparing canonical male poets with the work of other men whose work, like the women’s, was deemed inferior at the time. The book also features an appendix of significant poems by Russian women discussed in the text. Some, found in archival notebooks, are published here for the first time, and others are reprinted for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century.

This book argues that poetry played a major role in the mediation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars to the British public, and that the wars had a significant impact on poetic practices and theories in the Romantic period. It examines a wide range of writers, both canonical (Wordsworth,Coleridge, and Byron) and non-canonical (Smith, Southey, Scott, and Hemans), and locates their work within the huge amount of war poetry published in newspapers and magazines. It shows that poetry was a crucial form through which what were seen as the first modern or 'total' wars were imagined inBritain and that it was central to the cultural and political debates over the conflict with France. While the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars compelled poets to re-examine their roles, it was poetry itself which produced a major transformation of the imagining of war that would be influentialthroughout the nineteenth century.

Smith is shown to be both an innovator and a significant figure in understanding Romantic conceptions of gender. As the first book devoted to a serious critical study of Smith's poetry, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, poetry and the culture of gender will appeal to professional scholars and students alike."--Jacket.