Andrew Ashfield provides an important feminist document and a genuine means of unravelling Romanticism in Romantic Women Poets, an anthology of some 180 poems from the period 1770 to 1838.

The coastline of Great Britain was a powerful magnet for artists in the nineteenth-century. Its strong

One of the most exciting developments in Romantic studies in the past decade has been the rediscovery and repositioning of women poets as vital and influential members of the Romantic literary community. This is the first volume to focus on women poets of this era and to consider how their historical reception challenges current conceptions of Romanticism. With a broad, revisionist view, the essays examine the poetry these women produced, what the poets thought about themselves and their place in the contemporary literary scene, and what the recovery of their works says about current and past theoretical frameworks. The contributors focus their attention on such poets as Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, Mary Lamb, and Fanny Kemble and argue for a significant rethinking of Romanticism as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon. Grounding their consideration of the poets in cultural, social, intellectual, and aesthetic concerns, the authors contest the received wisdom about Romantic poetry, its authors, its themes, and its audiences. Some of the essays examine the ways in which many of the poets sought to establish stable positions and identities for themselves, while others address the changing nature over time of the reputations of these women poets.

This book explores Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its 'place' - understood in multiple ways - in literary history. It argues that Smith's work engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith's career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England.

In a revised, expanded, and updated second edition, a number of works have been added, and the editor has replaced Wordsworth's THIRTEEN-BOOK PRELUDE in favor of the much shorter TWO-PART PRELUDE, supplemented by well chosen extracts from the THIRTEEN-BOOK POEM. Other elements added to this new edition include expanded chronology, additional contents by author name, contents by theme, and more.