Ebook: Romanticism and Feminism (A Midland Book)

This volume of essays, together with the recent books of Mary Poovey,
Mary Jacobus, and Margaret Homans, 1 marks the coining of age of a
feminist criticism of the major texts of the English Romantic period. · These
essays developed out of the first sessions of the Modern Language Association
Convention devoted entirely to the problem of the English Romantic
poets and women, the sessions presented in December 1985 under the
auspices of the Late Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Divisions as well as
the Wordsworth/Coleridge Association and the Byron Society. This origin
explains both the variety of theoretical approaches and the absence of
essays on such major Romantic figures as Blake, Coleridge, and Percy
Shelley. One might argue, however, that the writers discussed here William
and Dorothy wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Scott, wollstonecraft,
Mary Lamb, Mary Shelley-are central to any discussion of the problem of
gender in English Romantic writing and criticism, since the particularly
prominent status of their work helped construct even as it represented
their society's attitudes toward sexual difference.