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.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: • Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic. • Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology. • Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry. This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.

This book provides innovative readings of literary works of British Romanticism and its influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary culture and thought.