British Romanticism was once thought of as a cultural movement defined by a small group of male poets. This study grants women poets their proper place in the literary culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries after nearly two centuries of neglect or marginalization by traditional literary history. Following an introductory chapter, this book examines these women poets from three interrelated critical and cultural perspectives: two chapters focus upon women, radical discourse, and poetry relating to war; two chapters upon genre (one exclusively on the sonnet and the other on long and short poetic forms); and two chapters upon Scottish and Irish women Romantic poets and the dynamics of national identity. The book reveals the considerable extent of these women poets' active participation within the rich cultural community of writers and readers throughout the British Isles during this formative moment in the modern era and demonstrates the range and diversity of their writings.
Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore and London, 2009