Description
Book SynopsisA lively and far-ranging interest in place(s), space(s), and situation characterizes the writing of the British Romantic-era author Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Smith repeatedly questions what it means to be British in her literature. In an era of intense nationalism, Smith explores her world in cosmopolitan terms.
Placing Charlotte Smith offers new insights into how Smith utilized the idea of place in multiple ways, such as a theme, an idea, a principle, or a metaphor. Several chapters in the collection examine of Smith’s own frequent change of location and the effect on these moves had on her conceptions of home and well-being. Other chapters analyze Smith’s accounts of radicalism and patriotism in terms of family and locate Smith’s literature within comedic, aesthetic, and scientific traditions. This volume of original essays advances contemporary understanding of two overarching themes in Smith studies: her place as a writer central to her period, and her contribution to the creation of “place” as a thing of social and literary importance.
Trade ReviewAlthough she aspired to be a citizen of the world, Charlotte Smith spent her entire literary career as a displaced person constantly on the move and fixated on the anomalies of her status. In Placing Charlotte Smith, a set of uniformly insightful and incisive essays concentrate on the acute sense of place Smith cultivated as a marker across her disparate productions in poetry and prose. In its large compass and its refined erudition, this important volume reminds us why Smith is such a radically original, indispensable figure in the Romantic scene.
-- Stuart Curran, professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Dolan and Labbe’s rich trove of essays will delight Smith scholars. Here is a collection of lucid, often eye-opening discussions of Smith’s essential interventions in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British literary culture. But Placing Charlotte Smith is no narrow specialist’s tome. The essays in this volume engage an extensive array of cultural issues and practices including visual and literary aesthetics, constructs of national identity, and domestic ideologies. Dolan and Labbe’s collection offers fresh perspectives to readers with broad interests in the period, as well as to those already familiar with Charlotte Smith’s work and life.
-- Anne D. Wallace, professor of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Elusive Charlotte Smith, by Stephen Behrendt
Chapter 2: “Far from my native fields removed”: Gentility, Displacement, and the Idea of Home in the Life and Poetry of Charlotte Smith, by Claire Knowles
Chapter 3: Creating Home: The Roots of Charlotte Smith’s Cosmopolitanism in Emmeline, by Elizabeth A. Dolan
Chapter 4: Charlotte Smith: English Patriot, by Mary Anne Myers
Chapter 5: Comedic Travel and Political Satire: Smollett, Fielding, and Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, by Anne Chandler
Chapter 6: Locating the Common in Charlotte Smith’s Ecocritical Writings for Children, by Lisa Vargo
Chapter 7: “On the green margin”: Science, Gender, and Originality in Charlotte Smith’s “Flora,” by Melissa Bailes
Chapter 8: “With Faithful Pencil”: Pastoral and Picturesque Composition in Beachy Head, by Rachael Isom
Chapter 9: “A Tale of Two Smiths”: In Pursuit of the Picturesque in Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, by Val Derbyshire
Chapter 10: Strange Shells of Poetry in the Landscape of Charlotte Smith’s Echoic Poetics, by Amelia Worsley
Epilogue: “I dispatch’d a Letter”: Encountering Charlotte Smith in her Original Editions, Holograph Letters, and Portrait, by Judith Phillips Stanton
