Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era

Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Dolan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351901338
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Arguing that vision was the dominant mode for understanding suffering in the Romantic era, Elizabeth A. Dolan shows that Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley experimented with aesthetic and scientific visual methods in order to expose the social structures underlying suffering. Dolan's exploration of illness, healing, and social justice in the writings of these three authors depends on two major questions: How do women writers' innovations in literary form make visible previously unseen suffering? And, how do women authors portray embodied vision to claim literary authority? Dolan's research encompasses a wide range of primary sources in science and medicine, including nosology, health travel, botany, and ophthalmology, allowing her to map the resonances and disjunctions between medical theory and literature. This in turn points towards a revisioning of enduring themes in Romanticism such as the figure of the Romantic poet, the relationship between the mind and nature, sensibility and sympathy, solitude and sociability, landscape aesthetics, the reform novel, and Romantic-era science. Dolan's book is distinguished by its deep engagement with several disciplines and genres, making it a key text for understanding Romanticism, the history of medicine, and the position of the woman writer during the period.

Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era

Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Dolan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351901338
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
Arguing that vision was the dominant mode for understanding suffering in the Romantic era, Elizabeth A. Dolan shows that Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley experimented with aesthetic and scientific visual methods in order to expose the social structures underlying suffering. Dolan's exploration of illness, healing, and social justice in the writings of these three authors depends on two major questions: How do women writers' innovations in literary form make visible previously unseen suffering? And, how do women authors portray embodied vision to claim literary authority? Dolan's research encompasses a wide range of primary sources in science and medicine, including nosology, health travel, botany, and ophthalmology, allowing her to map the resonances and disjunctions between medical theory and literature. This in turn points towards a revisioning of enduring themes in Romanticism such as the figure of the Romantic poet, the relationship between the mind and nature, sensibility and sympathy, solitude and sociability, landscape aesthetics, the reform novel, and Romantic-era science. Dolan's book is distinguished by its deep engagement with several disciplines and genres, making it a key text for understanding Romanticism, the history of medicine, and the position of the woman writer during the period.

Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era

Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Dolan
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754654919
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
As she explores tropes of illness, healing, and social justice in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley, Dolan engages with a wide range of primary sources in science and medicine. She argues that the Romantic-era interest in the physiology of vision influenced the culture's understanding of suffering, and that these three authors experimented with materialist modes of seeing in order to expand the language of suffering and to claim literary authority.

Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770-1820

Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770-1820 PDF Author: Joseph Morrissey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319703560
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
This book examines women’s domestic occupations in the Romantic-period novel at the most intimately human level. By examining the momentary thought and feeling processes that informed the playing of a harp, the stitching of a dress, or the reading of a gothic novel, the book shifts the focus from women’s socio-cultural contributions through domestic endeavor to how women’s day-to-day tasks shaped experiences of joy, friendship, resentment, and self. Through an understanding of domestic occupations as forms of human action, the study emphasises the inherent unpredictability of quotidian activities and draws attention to their capacity for exceeding cultural parameters. Specifically, the book examines needlework, musical accomplishment, novel reading, and sensibility in the work of Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, and Frances Burney, giving new perspectives on established canonical works while also providing the most sustained analysis of Charlotte Smith’s little studied novel, Ethelinde, to date.

British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century

British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Teresa Barnard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317171373
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Highlighting the remarkable women who found ways around the constraints placed on their intellectual growth, this collection of essays shows how their persistence opened up attributes of potent female imagination, radical endeavour, literary vigour, and self-education that compares well with male intellectual achievement in the long eighteenth century. Disseminating their knowledge through literary and documentary prose with unapologetic self-confidence, women such as Anna Barbauld, Anna Seward, Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie usurped subjects perceived as masculine to contribute to scientific, political, philosophical and theological debate and progress. This multifaceted exploration goes beyond traditional readings of women’s creativity to add fresh, at times controversial, insights into the female view of the intellectual world. Bringing together leading experts on British women’s lives, work and writings, the volume seeks to rediscover women’s appropriations of masculine disciplines and to examine their interventions into the intellectual world. Through their engagement with a unique perspective on women’s lives and achievements, the essays make important contributions to the existing body of knowledge in this important area that will inform future scholarship.

Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814

Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 PDF Author: Ingrid Horrocks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107182239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
A history of the writing of mobility in the Romantic period, through the work of major women writers.

Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods

Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods PDF Author: Andrew O'Malley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319947370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The essays in this volume offer fresh and innovative considerations both of how children interacted with the world of print, and of how childhood circulated in the literary cultures of the eighteenth century. They engage with not only the texts produced for the period’s newly established children’s book market, but also with the figure of the child as it was employed for a variety of purposes in literatures for adult readers. Embracing a wide range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives and considering a variety of contexts, these essays explore childhood as a trope that gained increasing cultural significance in the period, while also recognizing children as active agents in the worlds of familial and social interaction. Together, they demonstrate the varied experiences of the eighteenth-century child alongside the shifting, sometimes competing, meanings that attached themselves to childhood during a period in which it became the subject of intensified interest in literary culture.

Placing Charlotte Smith

Placing Charlotte Smith PDF Author: Jacqueline M. Labbe
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611462967
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A lively and far-ranging interest in place, space, and situation characterizes the work of Romantic-era British author Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Featuring ten original essays, an introduction and an epilogue, this volume offers new insights into Smith’s life and work by exploring two central issues: Smith’s place as a foundational writer in her period, and her contribution to the creation of “place” as a concept of social and literary importance. The contributors analyze themes such as itineracy, the natural world, and patriotism; they also explore the position of Smith’s work and authorial identity in terms of genre, aesthetics, and market dynamics. With its innovative approach to place as a material location, symbolic principle, and literary device, this volume advances our understanding of Smith’s work. Placing Charlotte Smith reveals Smith as an author who not only energizes our interest in domestic concerns, but who also shapes a global discourse constituted by changing ideas about borders, travel, national, and international identities.

Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature

Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature PDF Author: Essaka Joshua
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108872034
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The modern concept of disability did not exist in the Romantic period. This study addresses the anachronistic use of 'disability' in scholarship of the Romantic era, providing a disability studies theorized account that explores the relationship between ideas of function and aesthetics. Unpacking the politics of ability, the book reveals the centrality of capacity and weakness concepts to the egalitarian politics of the 1790s, and the importance of desert theory to debates about sentiment and the charitable relief of impaired soldiers. Clarifying the aesthetics of deformity as distinct from discussions of ability, Joshua uncovers a controversy over the use of deformity in picturesque aesthetics, offers accounts of deformity that anticipate recent disability studies theory, and discusses deformity and monstrosity as a blended category in Frankenstein. Setting aside the modern concept of disability, Joshua cogently argues for the historical and critical value of period-specific terms.

Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism

Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism PDF Author: Jacqueline Labbe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317314417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Charlotte Smith's early sonnets established the genre as a Romantic form; her novels advanced sensibility beyond its reliance on emotional facility; and her blank verse initiated one of the most familiar of Romantic verse forms. This volume draws together the best of current scholarship.

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: J. A. Downie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199566747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 625

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of the Eighteenth Century Novel is the first published book to cover the 'eighteenth-century English novel' in its entirety. It is an indispensible resource for those with an interest in the history of the novel.