Description
Book SynopsisThis fresh, informative account of key writers, important texts, and complex cultural currents promises keen interest for students and scholars, literary critics, and cultural historians.
Trade ReviewSusan Wolfson is not afraid to profess the study of literature. Her impressive body of work has reasserted the claims of close reading and formal literary values in the face (or the wake) of New Historical and other forms of social, materialist criticism which have tended to reduce poetic texts to the socio-political arguments that can be based on-or against-them. Yet she does this not in simple reaction to what has become a very prevailing trend in the field of Romantic criticism, but with a keen alertness to the moral issues raised in Romantic poetry, especially when they involve the status of women, and particularly women writers, then and now. The present book takes a further step in this direction by investigating poetic language and feminist issues, including the possibly 'feminine' valences of poetry itself. Its procedure is highly intertextual, reading texts back and forth, for and against, each other. New Books on Literature 19 2010 Wolfson employs historicizing criticism to study the relationship between Romantic authors' subjective agency and social connections. Choice 2011
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note on Texts
Introduction: "The will of a social being"
I. Two Women & Poetic Tradition
1. Charlotte Smith's Emigrants and the Politics of Allusion
2. Mary Wollstonecraft: Re:Reading the Poets
3. The Poets' "Wollstonecraft"
II. Gender Interactions, Generative Interactions: Two Wordsworths
4. Lyrical Ballads and the Pregnant Words of Men's Passions
5. William's Sister: Alternatives of Alter Ego
6. Dorothy's Conversation with William
III. A Public Attraction
7. Gazing on "Byron": Separation and Fascination
8. Byron and the Muse of Female Poetry
Notes
Works Cited
Index
