Description

Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters is an unprecedented work that provides an in-depth analysis of the work of women novelists from the Romantic age, a period that has long been exclusively designated as the province of canonized male poets. Although there are many volumes on the works of Austen and Shelley, this collection is the first to consider these writers and others in the wider context of English fiction by women during the 1780s to 1830s. Collectively, the authors examine the works of nearly fifteen women novelists of the Romantic period whose works encompass the prevailing social and political realities of the time. They demonstrate that women writers were not following a specific formula to produce their creative works but were instead responding to an insatiable market for their imaginative and infinitely varied wares. A must-read for scholars of women's studies as well as 19th century British literature, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters is sure to be an important resource for years to come.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Responding to the French Revolution: William's Julia and Burney's The Wanderer
Chapter 3 Having Her Cake and Eating, Too: Ambivalence, Popularity, and the Psychosocial Implications of Ann Radcliffe's Fiction
Chapter 4 The Preceptor as Fiend: Radcliffe's Psychology of the Gothic
Chapter 5 The Treatment of Women in the Novels of Charlotte Turner Smith
Chapter 6 Jane Austen's Opacities
Chapter 7 Susan Ferrier's Allusions: Comedy, Morality, and the Presence of Milton
Chapter 8 The Limits of Liberal Feminism in Maria Edgeworth's Belinda
Chapter 9 A Reading of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent
Chapter 10 Mary Wollestonecraft and Mary Shelley: Ideological Affinities
Chapter 11 The Alienation of Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Chapter 12 Mary Shelley, Shakespeare, and the Romantic Theatre
Chapter 13 Mary Shelley and the Romance of Science
Chapter 14 The Uses of Adventure: The Moral and Evangelical Robinsonnades of Agnes Strickland, Barbara Hofland and Ann Fraser Tytler
Chapter 15 Representative Chronology of English Novels by Women of the Romantic Period
Chapter 16 Selected Bibliography
Chapter 17 Index

Product details

Published 22 Mar 2000
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 186
ISBN 9780761816126
Imprint University Press of America
Dimensions 195 x 135 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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