Romantic Women Poets

This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.

Designed as a companion to Romanticism: An Anthology, Second Edition, this volume, dedicated exclusively to female poets of the Romantic period, contains complete and unabridged texts of: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven; Hannah More, Sensibility, The Bas-Bleu, and Slavery; Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (3rd Edition), The Emigrants, and Beachy Head; Ann Yearsley, Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade and Reflections on the Death of Louis XVI; Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, The Passage of the Mountain of St Gothard, A Poem; Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon; Helen Maria Williams, A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade and A Farewell, for Two Years, To England; Ann Batten Cristall, Poetical Sketches; Mary Tighe, Psyche; and Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King, and Records of Woman. The selection includes manuscript versions of poems by Susanna Blamire and Lady Caroline Lamb. Other poets represented are: Anna Seward, Mary Scott, Phillis Wheatley, Anne Grant, Joanna Baillie, Ann Radcliffe, Amelia Opie, Charlotte Byrne (aka Charlotte Dacre), Isabella Lickbarrow, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL).

A good ghost story can make your hair stand on end, your palms sweat, and your heart race. The bone-chilling collection Tales of Kentucky Ghosts presents more than 250 stories that do just that. In his new book, William Lynwood Montell has assembled an entertaining and diverse array of tales from across the commonwealth that will keep you checking under the bed every night. The first-person accounts in this collection showcase folklore that Montell has drawn from archives, family stories, and oral traditions throughout Kentucky. The stories include that of the ghost bride of Laurel County, who appears each year on the anniversary of her wedding day; the tale of the murdered worker who haunts the Simpson County home of his killer and former employer; and the account of the lost mandolin that plays itself in a house in Graves County. These and many other chilling stories haunt the pages of Tales of Kentucky Ghosts. In the tradition of MontellÕs previous Kentucky ghost books (Ghosts across Kentucky and Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky), Tales of Kentucky Ghosts brings together a variety of terrifying narratives that not only entertain and frighten but also serve as a unique record of KentuckyÕs rich heritage of storytelling.

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.

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.

The Romanticism that emerged after the American and French revolutions of 1776 and 1789 represented a new flowering of the imagination and the spirit, and a celebration of the soul of humanity with its capacity for love. This extraordinary collection sets the acknowledged genius of poems such as Blake's 'Tyger', Coleridge's 'Khubla Khan' and Shelley's 'Ozymandias' alongside verse from less familiar figures and women poets such as Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. We also see familiar poets in an unaccustomed light, as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley demonstrate their comic skills, while Coleridge, Keats and Clare explore the Gothic and surreal.

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.

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.