Angela Keane addresses the work of five women writers of the 1790s and its problematic relationship with the canon of Romantic literature. Refining arguments that women's writing has been overlooked, Keane examines the more complex underpinnings and exclusionary effects of the English national literary tradition. The book explores the negotiations of literate, middle-class women such as Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe with emergent ideas of national literary representation. As women were cast into the feminine, maternal role in Romantic national discourse, women like these who defined themselves in other terms found themselves exiled - sometimes literally - from the nation. These wandering women did not rest easily in the family-romance of Romantic nationalism nor could they be reconciled with the models of literary authorship that emerged in the 1790s.
1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France -- the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke's conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today. Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women's participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers' recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.
This book brings together two of the most significant British women writers of the Romantic period, Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams, and explores the poetics and politics of their work. In the 1790s, when Charlotte Smith and Helen Maria Williams were at the peak of their critical reputations, they were known to each other and often cited together approvingly. It was Smith who provided the young William Wordsworth with a letter of introduction to Williams when he visited France in 1791 (though she had left by the time he got there). By the end of the decade, Smith and Williams were being cited together more pejoratively, as two of a number of women who came to stand for the amoral, sexually suspect and politically naïve English 'Jacobins,' who were vilified in the conservative press. Neither were in fact 'Jacobins,' but they were revolutionary. This book looks at how Smith and Williams earned such reputations and at the politics and poetics of the works that reveal Smith to be a self-constructed Romantic and Williams as a mistress of intimate disguise.
Just as she helped launch the rediscovery of literary texts by American women writers, Nina Baym now uncovers the work of history performed by over 150 writers in over 350 texts. Here she explores a world of important writing unknown even to most specialists. The novels, poems, plays, textbooks, and travel narratives written by women between 1790 and the Civil War defy current theories of women's writing that stress a female domain of the private, homebound, and emotional. History is inarguably public in its nature and these women wrote it. In doing so, they challenged the imaginative and intellectual boundaries that divided domestic and public worlds. They claimed on behalf of all women the rights to know and to speak about the world outside the home, as well as to circulate their knowledge and opinions among the public. Their work helped shape the enormous public interest in history characteristic of the antebellum nation, and ultimately to forge our national identity in the history of the world. Nina Baym deftly outlines the master narrative of history implied in women's writings of this period, and discusses in a completely revisioned context the emergence of women's history in public discourse.
1790 saw the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France -- the definitive tract of modern conservatism as a political philosophy. Though women of the period wrote texts that clearly responded to and reacted against Burke's conception of English history and to the contemporary political events that continued to shape it, this conversation was largely ignored or dismissed, and much of it remains to be reconsidered today. Examining the works of women writers from Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft to the Strickland sisters and Mary Anne Everett Green, this book begins to recuperate that conversation and in doing so uncovers a more complete and nuanced picture of women's participation in the writing of history. Professor Mary Spongberg puts forward an alternate, feminized historiography of Britain that demonstrates how women writers' recourse to history caused them to become generically innovative and allowed them to participate in the political debates that framed the emergence of modern British historiography, and to push back against the Whig interpretation of history that predominated from 1790-1860.
This study examines how debates about history during the French Revolution informed and changed the nature of the British novel between 1790 and 1814. During these years, intersections between history, political ideology, and fiction, as well as the various meanings of the term "history" itself, were multiple and far reaching. Morgan Rooney elucidates these subtleties clearly and convincingly. While political writers of the 1790s--Burke, Price, Mackintosh, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and others--debate the historical meaning of the Glorious Revolution as a prelude to broader ideological arguments about the significance of the past for the present and future, novelists engage with this discourse by representing moments of the past or otherwise vying to enlist the authority of history to further a reformist or loyalist agenda. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Charles Walker, Robert Bisset, and Jane West draw on Burkean historical discourse to characterize the reform movement as ignorant of the complex operations of historical accretion. For their part, reform-minded novelists such as Charlotte Smith, William Godwin, and Maria Edgeworth travesty Burke's tropes and arguments so as to undermine and then redefine the category of history. As the Revolution crisis recedes, new novel forms such as Edgeworth's regional novel, Lady Morgan's national tale, and Jane Porter's early historical fiction emerge, but historical representation--largely the legacy of the 1790s' novel--remains an increasingly pronounced feature of the genre. Whereas the representation of history in the novel, Rooney argues, is initially used strategically by novelists involved in the Revolution debate, it is appropriated in the early nineteenth century by authors such as Edgeworth, Morgan, and Porter for other, often related ideological purposes before ultimately developing into a stable, nonpartisan, aestheticized feature of the form as practiced by Walter Scott. The French Revolution Debate and the British Novel, 1790-1814 demonstrates that the transformation of the novel at this fascinating juncture of British political and literary history contributes to the emergence of the historical novel as it was first realized in Scott's Waverley (1814).
During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britain’s ruling classes and laid the foundation for an increasingly globalized world. Written by middle-class women who mapped the world that they had neither funds nor freedom to traverse, the primers employed rhetorical tropes such as the Family of Man or discussions of food and customs in order to plot other cultures along an imperial hierarchy. Cross-disciplinary in nature, X Marks the Spot is an analysis of previously unknown material that examines the interplay between gender, imperial duty, and pedagogy. Megan A. Norcia offers an alternative map for traversing the landscape of nineteenth-century female history by reintroducing the primers into the dominant historical record. This is the first full-length study of the genre as a distinct tradition of writing produced on the fringes of professional geographic discourse before the high imperial period.
Demonstrating the breadth and scope of women’s writing in the Romantic period, this collection covers a variety of topics ranging across polemical treatises, private correspondence, philosophical and historical disquisitions, and poetry and prose fiction. Helping to contextualise the areas discussed, the collection includes a general introduction by the editor, which traces the history of criticism in the field, and thus current definitions of "Women and Romanticism", before going on to discuss the contents of each volume.
Scholars have fiercely debated the causes of the English Civil Wars and the rise of anti-monarchical and republican thought a century before the American Revolution. This ambitious and highly original book is the first to argue that women played a significant role in formulating and enacting English republican precepts. Even as feminists contend that republicanism's division of the private from the public sphere excluded women from political power, Gillespie demonstrates how seventeenth-century Englishwomen articulated republicanism's key insight: meaningful action, political or otherwise, does and should take place outside the purview of government, in spheres that not only include women, but that women helped construct. Drawing on the works of six women writers of the period, the book examines their writings and explores the key themes and concepts that they build upon.
