This is the first extended study of the role gender plays in the writing, reading, publishing, and reviewing of poetry in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain. Ross examines the ways in which Romanticism has been constructed, from the Romantic period to the present, as a masculine enterprise. He then traces the growth of a "feminine" poetic tradition from 1730 to 1830, showing the importance of this previously neglected tradition in the understanding of 19th-century British culture, and the development of current literary history, theory, and taste.

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.

Focusing on the poems of Wordsworth's "Great Decade," feminist critics have tended to see Wordsworth as an exploiter of women and "feminine" perspectives. In this original and provocative book, Judith Page examines works from throughout Wordsworth's long career to offer a more nuanced feminist account of the poet's values. She asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. Making extensive use of family letters, journals, and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet's daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

In this volume, a host of distinguished scholars examine Richard Rorty's influence on twentieth-century American pragmatism and its commitment to achieving social democracy. Rorty's reclaiming of the pragmatist tradition and his contribution to the discipline of intellectual history are highlighted; at the same time, each essay finds Rorty's pragmatism (most fully enunciated in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) lacking in its privatist vision of the good life. This criticism is drawn out through explicit comparisons between Rorty and his grandfather Walter Rauschenbusch, William James, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Richard J. Bernstein, and other twentieth century pragmatist thinkers. This volume offers the most complete historical treatment of this controversial intellectual to date.

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.

'Fatal Autonomy is a subtle, gracefully written, and politically astute reading of selected plays by the canonical Romantic poets. Jewett offers the most original and carefully circumscribed formulations to date of the interaction between language and politics as it is depicted in Romantic drama.'—Julie Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara Describing an enduring moral puzzle and explaining how it helped to shape a key moment in the history of poetic drama, Fatal Autonomy represents Romanticism as a reckoning with the costs of individual agency. No moral calculus can ever fully determine the relation of events to an individual's actions and failures to act, William Jewett argues; that is why the stubborn belief in such a relationship gives rise to tragedy. Jewett maintains that tragic drama forces its readers and viewers to confront the ways in which the use of language grants agency. The Romantic poets saw a moral challenge in that confrontation and followed its generic implications toward a new kind of poetry. Fatal Autonomy thus looks to Romantic drama to explain how Romantic poetry came to hold a permanent grip on conceptions of moral life. Tracing the source of major strains in British Romanticism to a politically charged body of dramatic poems, Jewett focuses on two historical moments: 1794-97, which he describes as the political turning point in the careers of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and 1819-22, the years in which he believes Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron wrote their best poetry.

Wordsworth: A Poet's History examines the range of Wordsworth's poetry and criticism over the course of his career. It examines the writer and his works against the backdrop of revolutionary history, public, personal as well as political. The study foregrounds the ways in which Wordsworth's account of 'self-representation in poetic language' coils around and recoils from the linguistic traumas excited by the French Revolution. The book also examines Wordsworth's patriotism and the evolution of this as demonstrated in his poetry.