A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism

Elizabeth Fay is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She the author of Becoming Wordsworthian: A Performative Aesthetics (1994) and of Eminent Rhetoric (1994).

List of Illustrations. List of Women Writers Discussed.

1 A Feminist Approach to Romantic Studies and the Case of Austen.

Standard Definitions and Revisions.

The Historical Period.

Feminist Theory and Romantic Studies.

Jane Austen, a Case Study.

2 Women and Politics: Writing Revolution.

Letters and the Maternal: Political Metaphors.

Revolution as a Frame of Mind.

Revolutionary Writing.

Maternal Nationalism and Children's Literature.

3 Women and the Gothic: Literature as Home Politics.

Defining the Gothic.

The Gothic as Domestic: Social Critique Gothics.

Psychological Drama Gothics.

The Romance of Real Life and the Radical Critique.

4 Women and Thought: Intellectual Critique.

The Bluestocking Circle in London.

Dissent and the Rights of the Home.

Women and History.

Literary Criticism as Art.

Intellectuality and the Years of Reaction.

5 Women and Identity: Visuality in Romantic Texts.

Seeing and Seen: The Writer and the Proper Lady.

Display and the Specular Heroine.

Tableaux Vivants, Theatrics and Burney's The Wanderer.

Conclusion.

Bibliography.

Index.