Real And Imagined Women In British Romanticism

"Real and Imagined Women in British Romanticism uses feminist ideology and deconstructive criticism to reconstruct the cultural context embedded in Romantic canonical texts. To achieve this end, the book undertakes a close textual study of these texts and places them in the intellectual context of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of culture. As a result of intellectual contextuallzing as well as theoretical applications, the Romantic imagination, as represented by William Wordsworth and John Keats, emerges as the place where gender division and gender certitude break down. This book intervenes in the traditional critical debates about the Romantic imagination to show that the Romantic imagination, as set forth in these texts, registers the vigorous cultural politics of gender and aesthetics that defined the 1790s and continued to exert influence for decades." --Book Jacket.

Employing gender as a unifying critical focus, Caroline Jackson-Houlston draws on the full range of Walter Scott’s novels to propose new links between Scott and Romantic-era authors such as Sophia Lee, Jane Porter, Jane Austen, Sydney Owenson, Elizabeth Hands, Thomas Love Peacock, and Robert Bage. In Scott, Jackson-Houlston suggests, sex and violence are united in a central feature of the genre of romance, the trope of raptus—the actual or threatened kidnapping of a woman and her subjection to physical or psychic violence. Though largely favouring the Romantic-period drive towards delicacy of subject-matter and expression, Scott also exhibited a residual sympathy for frankness and openness resisted by his publishers, especially towards the end of his career, when he increasingly used the freedoms inherent in romance as a mode of narrative to explore and critique gender assumptions. Thus, while Scott’s novels inherit a tradition of chivalric protectiveness towards women, they both exploit and challenge the assumption that a woman is always essentially definable as a potential sexual victim. Moreover, he consistently condemns the aggressive male violence characteristic of older models of the hero, in favour of restraint and domesticity that are not exclusively feminine, but compatible with the Scottish Enlightenment assumptions of his upbringing. A high proportion of Scott’s female characters are consistently more rational than their male counterparts, illustrating how he plays conflicting concepts of sexual difference off against one another. Jackson-Houlston illuminates Scott’s ambivalent reliance on the attractions of sex and violence, demonstrating how they enable the interrogation of gender convention throughout his fiction.

Through specific and rigorous analysis of contemporary literary texts, this book shows how writers from inside affected communities portray indigeneity, displacement, and trauma. In a world of increasing global inequality, this study aims to demonstrate how literature, and the study of it, can effect positive social change, notably in the face of global environmental, economic, and social injustice. This collection brings together a diverse and compelling array of voices from academics leading their fields around the world, to pioneer a new approach to literary analysis anchored in engagement with our changing world.

Betwixt and Between identifies the biases, errors and ambiguities that have run rampant in the biographies on Mary Wollstonecraft, many of them left unchecked and perpetuated from publication to publication. Brenda Ayres investigates the agenda, problems and strengths of eighteen critical biographies, beginning with William Godwin’s Memoirs (1798), ending with Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws (2015) and including ten lesser-known biographies. Betwixt and Between synthesizes the biographies, exposes gaps and contradictions, and attempts to fill and reconcile them, supplying in the process considerable information on Wollstonecraft that has never before been published.

Virginia Woolf was deeply interested in the past - whether literary, intellectual, cultural, political or social - and her writings interrogate it repeatedly. She was also a great tourist and explorer of heritage sites in England and abroad. This book brings together an international team ofworld-class scholars to explore how Woolf engaged with heritage, how she understood and represented it, and how she has been represented by the heritage industry.

Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century proceeds from the conviction that it is high time for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Chander demonstrates the importance of Romantic notions of authorship to such poets as Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), and Henry Lawson (Australia), using the work of these poets, each prominent in the national cultural of his own country, to explain the crucial role that the Romantic myth of the poet qua legislator plays in the development of nationalist movements across the globe. The first study of its kind, Brown Romantics examines how each of these authors develop poetic means of negotiating such key issues as colonialism, immigration, race, and ethnicity.

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite – closure, containment and stoniness – and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which 'female' porosity and 'manly' stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and 'feminine' genres, such as 'sloppy' letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.

First published in 2000, this collection of essays focuses on women theatre artists in the romantic period.