Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)
Cambridge University Press, 6/18/1998
EAN 9780521496544, ISBN10: 0521496543
Hardcover, 204 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
invisible girls
1. A woman's profession
sexual difference and the romance of authorship
2. The writer's ravishment
Byron's body politics
3. Classifying romanticism
the milliner girl and the magazines
4. Disfiguring economies
Mary Shelley's gift-book stories
5. The author's progress
William Hazlitt's Keswick escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal
6. Romanticism in the drawing room
Austen's interiority
Notes
List of works cited
Index.