Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author

This book explores the role of gender in early nineteenth-century British literary culture.

Sonia Hofkosh (Author)

9780521027700, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

204 pages, 5 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.313 kg

'This beautiful study has been under preparation for over a decade, and the reader is the beneficiary. Hofkosch's work is gracefully literary, uncompromisingly feminist, and theoretically adept.' European Romantic Review

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.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: invisible girls
1. A woman's profession: sexual difference and the romance of authorship
2. The writer's ravishment: Byron's body politics
3. Classifying romanticism: the milliner girl and the magazines
4. Disfiguring economies: Mary Shelley's gift-book stories
5. The author's progress: William Hazlitt's Keswick escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal
6. Romanticism in the drawing room: Austen's interiority
Notes
List of works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]