The first volume in the new series Gender Studies in Wales, this book argues that the way in which people came to perceive and to represent themselves as Welsh was profoundly affected by the gender ideologies prevalent during the Romantic and Victorian periods. "Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity" introduces readers to a hundred Welsh women authors at work during the years 1780-1900, some writing in Welsh and some in English. In so doing, it rescues many of these authors from critical neglect and oblivion. In the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, Welsh women writers in both languages were numerous and enjoyed a degree of influence on Welsh culture easily commensurate with that of women writers today. By covering the nineteenth century chronologically, this book traces the coming into being of the Welsh nation as its women in particular saw it, and as they helped to create it.

This essay collection rediscovers and reassesses a host of still little-known, pre-1914, Welsh women writers. In the last few decades considerable advances have been made towards rediscovering, contextualising, and analysing women’s writing from Wales. The combined influences of the post-1960s women’s movement, the 1990s Welsh devolution successes, and the development of the ‘Four Nations’ school of British literary criticism, have together effected significant advances in the field of Welsh feminist literary studies. This book focuses in particular on: the fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Welsh-language bards, such as Gwerful Mechain, Angharad James, and Marged Dafydd; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-language poets, including Katherine Philips, Jane Brereton, Anne Penny, and Anne Hughes; contributors to the Romantic movement in Wales, such as the poets and novelists Mary Robinson and Ann of Swansea; the mid-nineteenth-century protesting voice of polemicists such as Jane Williams (Ysgafell); the Victorian English-language novelists, for example Louisa Matilda Spooner, Anne Beale, Amy Dillwyn, Allen Raine, and Mallt Williams, and their concern with national, class, and gender identities; and early twentieth-century Welsh-language writers engaged with Welsh Home Rule and women’s suffrage issues, such as Gwyneth Vaughan and Eluned Morgan. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

This period witnessed the first full flowering of women's writing in Britain. This illuminating volume features leading scholars who draw upon the last 25 years of scholarship and textual recovery to demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of women in the period, discussing writers such as Austen, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers overviews critical reception for Romantic women writers from their earliest periodical reviews through the most current scholarship and directs users to avenues of future research. It is divided into two parts.The first section offers topical discussions on the status of provincial poets, on women’s engagement in children’s literature, the relation of women writers to their religious backgrounds, the historical backgrounds to women’s orientalism, and their engagement in debates on slavery and abolition.The second part surveys the life and careers of individual women – some 47 in all with sections for biography, biographical resources, works, modern editions, archival holdings, critical reception, and avenues for further research. The final sections of each essay offer further guidance for researchers, including “Signatures” under which the author published, and a “List of Works” accompanied, whenever possible, with contemporary prices and publishing formats. To facilitate research, a robust “Works Cited” includes all texts mentioned or quoted in the essay.

This book reveals the breadth and depth of women’s engagements with Arthurian romance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Tracing the variety of women’s responses to the medieval revival through Gothic literature, travel writing, scholarship, and decorative gift books, it argues that differences in the kinds of Arthurian materials read by and prepared for women produced a distinct female tradition in Arthurian writing. Examining the Arthurian interests of the best-selling female poets of the day, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and uncovering those of many of their contemporaries, the Arthurian myth in the Romantic period is a vibrant location for debates about the function of romance, the role of the imagination, and women’s place in literary history.

Examines Welsh writing in English in the context of critical debates concerning the rise of cultural nationalism and the ‘invention’ of Great Britain as a nation in the eighteenth century. This study investigates the ways in which Anglophone literature from and about Wales imagines the nation and its culture in a range of genres.