Sexual Politics And The Romantic Author

Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

Joel Schwartz presents the first systematic treatment of Rousseau's understanding of the political importance of women, sexuality, and the family. Using both Rousseau's lesser-known literary works and such major writings as Emile, Julie, and The Second Discourse, he offers an original and provocative presentation of Rousseau's argument. To read Rousseau, Schwartz believes, is to enter into a profound discourse about the meaning of sexual equality and the opportunities, pitfalls, costs, and benefits that sexual relationships bestow and impose on us all. His own thoughtful reading of Rousseau opens up fresh perspectives on political philosophy and the history of sexual, masculine, and feminine psychology.

From the vampires Lestat and Louis to a sexually liberated Sleeping Beauty, novelist Anne Rice has created a host of characters who are notable for their paradoxical combinations of the deviant and the conventional. Exit to Eden, for example, ends with the sado-masochistic protagonists embarking on a traditional monogamous heterosexual relationship, while the vampires often long to exchange their erotic immortality for "ordinary" mortal lives and loves. This scholarly analysis of the seemingly incompatible elements of the subversive and the socially acceptable in Rice's early work covers her career from the landmark Interview with the Vampire (1976) to Lasher (1993). Each chapter tackles a different aspect of Rice's conflicting portrayals of sexual issues, including homophobia, pedophilia, castration anxiety, and the vast array of gender stereotypes and roles that her novels so often interpret and exploit. This study is appropriate both for readers of Rice's writing and those intrigued by issues of sexual politics and the ways in which a popular author both embraces and repudiates some of the most shocking concepts of sexuality. An index and bibliography are included to aid research.

Examines Blake's place within a bourgeois culture in the process of redefining the role and meaning of sexuality.

Jane Austen's ironic reference to 'the trash with which the press now groans' is only one of innumerable Romantic complaints about fiction's newly overwhelming presence. This book draws on evidence from over one hundred Romantic novels to explore the changes in publishing, reviewing, reading, and writing that accompanied the unprecedented growth in novel publication during the Romantic period. With particular focus on the infamous Minerva Press, the most prolific fiction-producer of the age, Hannah Hudson puts its popular authors in dialogue with writers such as Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and William Godwin. Using paratextual materials including reviews, advertisements, and authorial prefaces, this book establishes the ubiquity of Romantic anxieties about literary 'excess', showing how beliefs about fictional overproduction created new literary hierarchies. Ultimately, Hudson argues that this so-called excess was a driving force in fictional experimentation and the advertising and publication practices that shaped the genre's reception. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

In early nineteenth-century Britain, there was unprecedented interest in the subject of genius, as well as in the personalities and private lives of creative artists. This was also a period in which literary magazines were powerful arbiters of taste, helping to shape the ideological consciousness of their middle-class readers. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine considers how these magazines debated the nature of genius and how and why they constructed particular creative artists as geniuses. Romantic writers often imagined genius to be a force that transcended the realms of politics and economics. David Higgins, however, shows in this text that representations of genius played an important role in ideological and commercial conflicts within early nineteenth-century literary culture. Furthermore, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine bridges the gap between Romantic and Victorian literary history by considering the ways in which Romanticism was understood and sometimes challenged by writers in the 1830s. It not only discusses a wide range of canonical and non-canonical authors, but also examines the various structures in which these authors had to operate, making it an interesting and important book for anyone working on Romantic literature.

This book challenges our current critical understanding of the relations between gender, genre, and literary authority in this period.

A one-stop resource containing introductory material through to practical case studies in reading primary and secondary texts to introducing criticism and new directions in research.

Demonstrating the breadth and scope of women’s writing in the Romantic period, this collection covers a variety of topics ranging across polemical treatises, private correspondence, philosophical and historical disquisitions, and poetry and prose fiction. Helping to contextualise the areas discussed, the collection includes a general introduction by the editor, which traces the history of criticism in the field, and thus current definitions of "Women and Romanticism", before going on to discuss the contents of each volume.