This book offers new insights into the ambiguous masculinity within male romantic poetry, discussing the work of Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge, among others.

Taking twenty women writers of the Romantic period, Romanticism and Gender explores a neglected period of the female literary tradition, and for the first time gives a broad overview of Romantic literature from a feminist perspective.

Reinventing Romantic Poetry offers a new look at the Russian literary scene in the nineteenth century. While celebrated poets such as Aleksandr Pushkin worked within a male-centered Romantic aesthetic—the poet as a bard or sexual conqueror; nature as a mother or mistress; the poet’s muse as an idealized woman—Russian women attempting to write Romantic poetry found they had to reinvent poetic conventions of the day to express themselves as women and as poets. Comparing the poetry of fourteen men and fourteen women from this period, Diana Greene revives and redefines the women’s writings and offers a thoughtful examination of the sexual politics of reception and literary reputation. The fourteen women considered wrote poetry in every genre, from visions to verse tales, from love lyrics to metaphysical poetry, as well as prose works and plays. Greene delves into the reasons why their writing was dismissed, focusing in particular on the work of Evdokiia Rostopchina, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, and Karolina Pavlova. Greene also considers class as a factor in literary reputation, comparing canonical male poets with the work of other men whose work, like the women’s, was deemed inferior at the time. The book also features an appendix of significant poems by Russian women discussed in the text. Some, found in archival notebooks, are published here for the first time, and others are reprinted for the first time since the mid-nineteenth century.

This book examines certain literary works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, and John Keats because, on the one hand, they represent patriarchal hegemony and, on the other, they present a challenge to it. The primary objective of the book is to demonstrate that despite their tendency towards liberty, individual rights, and imagination, these poets did not consistently choose one attitude towards women in their literary works. Suggesting that Byron, Shelley and Keats were caught between their liberal views on women and patriarchal norms of their age, the book discusses how their attitudes towards women lack consistency through an analysis of the specific roles assigned to women, both in accordance with and in defiance of traditional gender norms.

Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender focuses on the part played by women poets in the creation of the literary canon in the Romantic period in Britain. Its thirteen essays enrich our panoramic view of an age that is traditionally dominated by male authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Scott. Instead the volume concentrates on the poetical theory and practice of such extraordinary and fascinating women as Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetita Barbauld, Dorothy Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Lady Morgan, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Anna Seward, and Lady Caroline Lamb. Female and male poetics, gender and genres, literary forms and poetic modes are extensively discussed together with the diversity of behaviour and personal responses that the individual women poets offered to their age and provoked in their readers. There have been several important collections of essays in this particular area of study in the last few years, but this volume reflects and complements much of this earlier critical work with specific strengths of its own.

This study will be a key resource for scholars, teachers, and students in British literary studies, women's studies, and cultural history.--Stuart Curran, University of Pennsylvania "Internet Review of Books"

This wide-ranging and original book reappraises the role of genre, and genre theory, in British Romanticism. Analyzing numerous examples from 1760 to 1830, David Duff examines the generic innovations and experiments which propel the Romantic 'revolution in literature', but also the fascination with archaic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, and romance, whose revival and transformation make Romanticism a 'retro' movement as well as a revolutionary one. The tension between the drives to 'make it old' and to 'make it new' generates one of the most dynamic phases in the history of literature, whose complications are played out in the critical writing of the period as well as its creative literature. Incorporating extensive research on classification systems and reception history as well as on literary forms themselves, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre demonstrates how new ideas about the role and status of genre influenced not only authors but also publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers. The focus is on poetry, but a wider spectrum of genres is considered, a central theme being the relationship - hierarchical, competitive, combinatory - between genres. Among the topics addressed are generic primitivism and forgery; Enlightenment theory and the 'cognitive turn'; the impact of German transcendental aesthetics; organic and anti-organic form; the role of genre in the French Revolution debate; the poetics of the fragment; and the theory and practice of genre-mixing. Unprecedented in its scope and detail, this important book establishes a new way of reading Romantic literature which brings into focus for the first time its tangled relationship with genre.