Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - History of Literature, Eras, grade: 2,0, National University of Ireland, Galway, language: English, abstract: During the last decades feminist literary criticism has increased and also looks back on the past of literary of Romanticism. “The first stage in the feminist consideration was a sustained critique of the ways in which women where represented in poetry of the male Romantic poets in tandem with a consideration of why it was that there were so few women in the canon itself.” (Janowitz, Preface) Regarding this, the question of the importance of gender in understanding Romanticism in general comes up. What kind of role did women play during Romanticism, what did they mean within romantic poetic and who were those few female romantic writer, who did not only write poems but also novels, prose and polemics? “Feminist literary criticism has been a crucial force of the development of what we now more broadly call ‘gender studies’”. (Janowirt, Preface) The present essay is to elaborate the feminist literary criticism and clarify the question about the importance of gender in understanding Romanticism. To do so, I will focus, on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, with a special regard on her prose text Belinda, as well as on the works and the relationship of the Wordsworth’s siblings, and especially the feminine as representation in texts written by William. During the Romantic era, which duration was from 1785, starting quite accurate with Wordworth’s ‘Lyrik Ballads’, to 1832, emotion, feeling, original creation, obsession with nature, and the individual settled in all the art, including writing.

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.

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.

Combining queer theory with theories of affect, psychoanalysis, and Foucauldian genealogy, Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini theorizes performative melancholia, a condition where, regardless of sexual orientation, overinvestment in gender norms causes subjects who are unable to embody those norms to experience socially expected (‘normal’) gender as something unattainable or lost. This perceived loss causes an ambivalence within the subject that can lead to self-inflicted violence (masochism, suicide) or violence toward others (sadism, murder). Reading a range of Romantic poetry and novels between 1790-1820, but ultimately moving beyond the period to show its contemporary cultural relevance through readings of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, and George Sodini’s 2009 murder-suicide case, this study argues that we need to move beyond focusing on bullying, teens, and LGBT students and look at our cultural investment in gender normativity itself. Doing so allows us to recognize that the relationship between non-normative gender performance and violence is not simply a gay problem; it is a human problem that can affect people of any sex, sexuality, age, race, or ethnicity and one that we can trace back to the Romantic period. Bringing late 18th-century novels into conversation with both canonical and lesser-known Romantic poetry, allows us to see that, as people whose performance of gender occasionally exceeds the normal, we too often internalize these norms and punish ourselves or others for our inability to adhere to them. Contrasting paired chapters by male and female authors and including sections on failed romantic coupling, melancholic femininities, melancholic masculinities, failed gender performance and madness, and ending with a section titled After Romanticism, this study works on multiple levels to complicate previous understandings of gender and violence in Romanticism while also offering a model for contemporary issues relating to gender and violence among people who ‘fail’ to perform gender according to social norms.

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.

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.

"Romantic-era literature offers a key message: surveillance, in all its forms, was experienced distinctly and differently by women than men. Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period examines how familiar and neglected texts internalise and interrogate the ways in which targeted, asymmetric, and often isolating surveillance made women increasingly and uncomfortably visible in a way that still resonates today. The book combines the insights of modern Surveillance Studies with Romantic scholarship. It provides readers with a new context in which to understand Romantic-period texts and looks critically at emerging paradigms of surveillance directed at marginal groups, as well as resistance to such monitoring. Works by writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and Joanna Baillie, as well as Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey give a new perspective on the age that produced the Panopticon. This book is designed to appeal to a wide readership, and is aimed at students and scholars of surveillance, literature, Romanticism, and gender politics, as well as those interested in important strands of women's experience not only for the additional layers they reveal about the Romantic era but also for their relevance to current debates around asymmetries of power within gendered surveillance"--