Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818

Revolutions in Taste, 1773–1818
Author: Fiona Price
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317063309

How and to what extent did women writers shape and inform the aesthetics of Romanticism? Were undervalued genres such as the romance, gothic fiction, the tale, and the sentimental and philosophical novel part of a revolution leading to newer, more democratic models of taste? Fiona Price takes up these important questions in her wide-ranging study of women's prose writing during an extended Romantic period. While she offers a re-evaluation of major women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, Price also places emphasis on less well-known figures, including Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Hamilton and Priscilla Wakefield. The revolution in taste occasioned by their writing, she argues, was not only aesthetic but, following in the wake of British debates on the French Revolution, politically charged. Her book departs from previous studies of aesthetics that emphasize the differences between male and female writers or focus on higher status literary forms such as the treatise. In demonstrating that women writers' discussion of taste can be understood as an intervention at the most fundamental level of political involvement, Price advances our understanding of Romantic aesthetics.

Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816

Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756–1816
Author: Claire Grogan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2016-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317078527

In the first book-length study of the well-respected and popular British writer Elizabeth Hamilton, Claire Grogan addresses a significant gap in scholarship that enlarges and complicates critical understanding of the Romantic woman writer. From 1797 to 1818, Hamilton published in a wide range of genres, including novels, satires, historical and educational treatises, and historical biography. Because she wrote from a politically centrist position during a revolutionary age, Grogan suggests, Hamilton has been neglected in favor of authors who fit within the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin framework used to situate women writers of the period. Grogan draws attention to the inadequacies of the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary for understanding writers like Hamilton, arguing that Hamilton and other women writers engaged with and debated the issues of the day in more veiled ways. For example, while Hamilton did not argue for sexual emancipation à la Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, she asserted her rights in other ways. Hamilton's most radical advance, Grogan shows, was in her deployment of genre, whether she was mixing genres, creating new generic medleys, or assuming competence in a hitherto male-dominated genre. With Hamilton serving as her case study, Grogan persuasively argues for new strategies to uncover the means by which women writers participated in the revolutionary debate.

Small Change

Small Change
Author: Harriet Guest
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2000-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0226310523

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the social role of educated women and the nature of domesticity were the focus of widespread debate in Britain. The emergence of an identifiably feminist voice in that debate is the subject of Harriet Guest's new study, which explores how small changes in the meaning of patriotism and the relations between public and private categories permitted educated British women to imagine themselves as political subjects. Small Change considers the celebration of learned women as tokens of national progress in the context of a commercial culture that complicates notions of gender difference. Guest offers a fascinating account of the women of the bluestocking circle, focusing in particular on Elizabeth Carter, hailed as the paradigmatic learned and domestic woman. She discusses the importance of the American war to the changing relation between patriotism and gender in the 1770s and 1780s, and she casts new light on Mary Wollstonecraft's writing of the 1790s, considering it in relation to the anti-feminine discourse of Hannah More, and the utopian feminism of Mary Hays.

Lives of the Great Romantics, Part III, Volume 1

Lives of the Great Romantics, Part III, Volume 1
Author: Pamela Clemit
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1000748286

This volume sheds light on contemporary perception of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, a biographically and intellectually compelling literary family of the Romantic period. The writings reveal the personalities of the subjects, and the motives and agendas of the biographers.