Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry

Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry PDF Author: Daniel P. Watkins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813014388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
"Will assume a significant role in what is unquestionably the most important area of new, revisionary work in romantic studies. . . . Watkins extends the work of recent feminist romantic critics who have been developing one of the liveliest critical debates in studies of British romanticism. . . . Watkins' theoretical analysis of the gender dynamics at work in the logics of Sadeian power, bourgeois capitalism, and romantic idealism offers a new perspective on the gendering of romantic discourse."--Greg Kucich, University of Notre Dame When a romanticist links sexual violence and visionary idealism, literary critics and scholars take notice. Built on important arguments from the last two decades, this book is a timely contribution to current work in cultural studies generally and in romantic studies particularly. The central argument is simple but contentious: sadism and British romanticism are both products of an emergent capitalist world order in the late 18th century; they are bound together by the far-reaching cultural logic of that order. Although the vision of one is characterized by sexual violence, of the other by visionary idealism, both express the reality of their historical moment, which was a reality of rigid and masculine hierarchies of value. Watkins provides a descriptive analysis of these hierarchies of value as they are manifested in romantic poetry and investigates their historical and political dimensions. He also builds upon earlier feminist studies of British romanticism by examining the ineluctable historical and social relations among bourgeois ideology, romantic idealism, and sexual violence in an effort, first, to describe the gender-specific dynamics of the romantic imagination and, second, to recuperate certain utopian and potentially transformative elements within romanticism. The study concludes that, despite its strong masculinist ideology, romanticism in its historical definition is indispensable to a feminist effort to keep utopian thought alive while working to liberate desire from unequal relations of power. Daniel P. Watkins is professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He is the coeditor of Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods and the author of A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (UPF, 1993), Keats' Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination, and Social Relations in Byron's Eastern Tales.

Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry

Sexual Power in British Romantic Poetry PDF Author: Daniel P. Watkins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813014388
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Will assume a significant role in what is unquestionably the most important area of new, revisionary work in romantic studies. . . . Watkins extends the work of recent feminist romantic critics who have been developing one of the liveliest critical debates in studies of British romanticism. . . . Watkins' theoretical analysis of the gender dynamics at work in the logics of Sadeian power, bourgeois capitalism, and romantic idealism offers a new perspective on the gendering of romantic discourse."--Greg Kucich, University of Notre Dame When a romanticist links sexual violence and visionary idealism, literary critics and scholars take notice. Built on important arguments from the last two decades, this book is a timely contribution to current work in cultural studies generally and in romantic studies particularly. The central argument is simple but contentious: sadism and British romanticism are both products of an emergent capitalist world order in the late 18th century; they are bound together by the far-reaching cultural logic of that order. Although the vision of one is characterized by sexual violence, of the other by visionary idealism, both express the reality of their historical moment, which was a reality of rigid and masculine hierarchies of value. Watkins provides a descriptive analysis of these hierarchies of value as they are manifested in romantic poetry and investigates their historical and political dimensions. He also builds upon earlier feminist studies of British romanticism by examining the ineluctable historical and social relations among bourgeois ideology, romantic idealism, and sexual violence in an effort, first, to describe the gender-specific dynamics of the romantic imagination and, second, to recuperate certain utopian and potentially transformative elements within romanticism. The study concludes that, despite its strong masculinist ideology, romanticism in its historical definition is indispensable to a feminist effort to keep utopian thought alive while working to liberate desire from unequal relations of power. Daniel P. Watkins is professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He is the coeditor of Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods and the author of A Materialist Critique of English Romantic Drama (UPF, 1993), Keats' Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination, and Social Relations in Byron's Eastern Tales.

British Romantic Drama

British Romantic Drama PDF Author: Terence Allan Hoagwood
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637432
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The present volume attempts a systematic explanation of various dimensions of Romantic drama by foregrounding both the theoretical and practical questions bearing on Romantic drama in its historical situation. In this effort, the volume intentionally gravitates toward discussion of lesser-known works of the period, rather than such major dramas as Manfred or Prometheus Unbound. This is because the poetic dramas by Byron and Shelley have already been the subject of many useful historicist investigations, and also because lesser-known works - for instance, the dramas of Scott, Wordsworth's Borderers, and the many revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dramas of the period - provide avenues into historical and ideological issues that cannot be adequately addressed by exclusive attention to dramas long recognized as canonical.

Equivocal Beings

Equivocal Beings PDF Author: Claudia L. Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226401790
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In the wake of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that civil order depended upon nurturing the sensibility of men—upon the masculine cultivation of traditionally feminine qualities such as sentiment, tenderness, veneration, awe, gratitude, and even prejudice. Writers as diverse as Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, and Rousseau were politically motivated to represent authority figures as men of feeling, but denied women comparable authority by representing their feelings as inferior, pathological, or criminal. Focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, whose popular works culminate and assail this tradition, Claudia L. Johnson examines the legacy male sentimentality left for women of various political persuasions. Demonstrating the interrelationships among politics, gender, and feeling in the fiction of this period, Johnson provides detailed readings of Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, and Burney, and treats the qualities that were once thought to mar their work—grotesqueness, strain, and excess—as indices of ideological conflict and as strategies of representation during a period of profound political conflict. She maintains that the reactionary reassertion of male sentimentality as a political duty displaced customary gender roles, rendering women, in Wollstonecraft's words, "equivocal beings."

North York Moors, west sheet

North York Moors, west sheet PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Key Concepts in Romantic Literature

Key Concepts in Romantic Literature PDF Author: Jane Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137096705
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832). The book offers a comprehensive and critically up-to-date account of the fascinating poetry, novels and drama which characterized the Romantic period alongside an historically-informed account of the important social, political and aesthetic contexts which shaped that body of writing. The epochal poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; the drama of Joanna Baillie and Charles Robert Maturin; the novels of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; all of these figures and many more are insightfully discussed here, together with clear and helpful accounts of the key contexts of the age's literature (including the French Revolution, slavery, industrialisation, empire and the rise of feminism) as well as accounts of perhaps less familiar aspects of late Georgian culture (such as visionary spirituality, atheism, gambling, fashion, music and sport). This is the broadest guide available to late eighteenth and early 19th century British and Irish literature, history and culture.

Romanticism, Gender, and Violence

Romanticism, Gender, and Violence PDF Author: Nowell Marshall
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611484677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
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.

A Companion to Romantic Poetry

A Companion to Romantic Poetry PDF Author: Charles Mahoney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444390643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
Through a series of 34 essays by leading and emerging scholars, A Companion to Romantic Poetry reveals the rich diversity of Romantic poetry and shows why it continues to hold such a vital and indispensable place in the history of English literature. Breaking free from the boundaries of the traditionally-studied authors, the collection takes a revitalized approach to the field and brings together some of the most exciting work being done at the present time Emphasizes poetic form and technique rather than a biographical approach Features essays on production and distribution and the different schools and movements of Romantic Poetry Introduces contemporary contexts and perspectives, as well as the issues and debates that continue to drive scholarship in the field Presents the most comprehensive and compelling collection of essays on British Romantic poetry currently available

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism PDF Author: Stuart Curran
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521199247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A fully updated edition of this popular Companion, with two new essays reflecting new developments in the field.

Keats, Modesty and Masturbation

Keats, Modesty and Masturbation PDF Author: Rachel Schulkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317109368
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Examining John Keats’s reworking of the romance genre, Rachel Schulkins argues that he is responding to and critiquing the ideals of feminine modesty and asexual femininity advocated in the early nineteenth century. Through close readings of Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia and ’La Belle Dame sans Merci,’ Schulkins offers a re-evaluation of Keats and his poetry designed to demonstrate that Keats’s sexual imagery counters conservative morality by encoding taboo desires and the pleasures of masturbation. In so doing, Keats presents a version of female sexuality that undermines the conventional notion of the asexual female. Schulkins engages with feminist criticism that largely views Keats as a misogynist poet who is threatened by the female’s overwhelming sexual and creative presence. Such criticism, Schulkins shows, tends towards a problematic identification between poet and protagonist, with the text seen as a direct rendering of authorial ideology. Such an interpretation neither distinguishes between author, protagonist, text, social norms and cultural history nor recognises the socio-sexual and political undertones embedded in Keats’s rendering of the female. Ultimately, Schulkins’s book reveals how Keats’s sexual politics and his refutation of the asexual female model fed the design, plot and vocabulary of his romances.

Shelley's Textual Seductions

Shelley's Textual Seductions PDF Author: Samuel Lyndon Gladden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317240383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
First published in 2002. This book surveys how and to what effect Shelley uses erotic narratives to mask political rhetoric within his attempts to describe and bring forth utopia. Posing erotic relationships as both an exemplar of the inequities of power and a paradigm for alternative social orders that dismantle oppressive structures, it argues Shelley’s work imagines a space where the rigidity of tyranny succumbs to the liberation of ecstatic union. From the Romantics to the Aesthetes, it argues that this model contributed to a counter-tradition in British literature which situates the erotic as a trope for political discourse. This work will be of interest to students of literature.