Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings

by Angela Keane

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521022408
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/10/2005
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #44
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.51(d)
Lexile:	1600L (what's this?)

About the Author

Angela Keane is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is co-editor, with Avril Horner of Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality (1999) and the author of many articles on women and Romanticism.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: romantic belongings; 2. Domesticating the sublime: Ann Radcliffe and Gothic dissent; 3. Forgotten sentiments: Helen Maria Williams's Letters from France; 4. Exiles and emigrés: the wanderings of Charlotte Smith; 5. Mary Wollstonecraft and the national body; 6. Patrician, populist and patriot: Hannah More's counter-revolutionary nationalism; Afterword.

Editorial Reviews

"Keane's book makes a valuable contribution to the fast-growing body of scholarship on the role of women in the formation of British nationalism. By offering us the image of the truly cosmopolitan female political theorist...Keane provides a new perspective on the increasingly important debate concerning the origins and character of the English nation." Nineteenth-Century Contexts

From the Publisher