Awarded the 2005 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize by the International Conference on Romanticism This book explores a cosmopolitan tradition of nineteenth-century novels written in response to Germaine de Staël's originary novel of the artist as heroine, corinne. The first book to delineate the contours of an international women's Romanticism, it argues that the künstlerromane of Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim, and George Sand offer feminist understandings of history and transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within. The book examines meditative, mystical and utopian visions of religious and artistic transcendence in the novels of women Romanticists as vehicles for the representation of a gendered subjectivity that seeks detachment and distance from the interests and strictures of the existing patriarchal social and cultural order. For these writers, the author argues, self-transcendence means an abandonment or dissolution of the individual self through political and spiritual efforts that culminate in a revelation of the divinity of a collective selfhood that comes into being through historical process.

This volume argues that the künstlerromane of Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim, and George Sand offer feminist understandings of history and transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within.

This volume argues that the künstlerromane of Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim, and George Sand offer feminist understandings of history and transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within.

Beginning with the premise that men and women of the Romantic period were lively interlocutors who participated in many of the same literary traditions and experiments, Fellow Romantics offers an inspired counterpoint to studies of Romantic-era women writers that stress their differences from their male contemporaries. As they advance the work of scholars who have questioned binary approaches to studying male and female writers, the contributors variously link, among others, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and the male Romantic poets. These pairings invite us to see anew the work of both male and female writers by drawing our attention to frequently neglected aspects of each writer's art. Here we see writers of both sexes interacting in their shared historical moment, while the contributors reorient our attention toward common points of engagement between male and female authors. What is gained is a more textured understanding of the period that will serve as a model for future studies.

This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Byron and Madame de Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen; and the reaction to Byronism of the Brontës and Harriet Beecher Stowe. It thus challenges previous critics' segregation of the male Romantic poets from their female peers, whose agenda was perceived to be different: domestic and social.

First published in 2006. Women and Romanticism’s third volume covers Poetics, the Novel and Authorship and brings together work on poetics, the novel and authorship. Joanna Baillie and Elizabeth Hamilton wrote manifestoes not terribly different in kind from those produced by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and excerpts from their work are included here. But Romantic-era women writers more often make statements about art and poetics covertly, in poems and in tales as well as in biographical writing, and the editor acknowledges this tendency in the third volume by drawing upon these genres. Until the 1980s, a five-volume collection of materials on ‘Women and Romanticism’ would have been inconceivable, since Romantic studies largely restricted itself to a consideration of the major male poets of the period (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats), When women were present in accounts of Romanticism, they were considered in terms of their literary function (as objects of representation), or in relation to their domestic (as mothers, daughters, wives and lovers of the authors). Indeed, the first Romantic women writers to enter academic discourse were those with familial connections to the canonized poets: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Dorothy Wordsworth. Other writers of interest in the 1970s included Frances Burney and Jane Austen.

What did it mean to write as a woman in the Romantic era? How did women writers test and refashion the claims or the grand self, the central 'I, ' we typically see in Romanticism? In this powerful and original study Meena Alexander examines the work of three women: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) the radical feminist who typically thought of life as 'warfare' and revolted against the social condition of women; Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) who lived a private life enclosed by the bonds of femininity, under the protection of her poet brother William and his family; Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter that Wollstonecraft died giving birth to, mistress then wife of the poet Percy Shelley, and precocious author of Frankenstein. Contents: Introduction: Mapping a Female Romanticism; Romantic Feminine; True Appearances; Of Mothers and Mamas; Writing in Fragments; Natural Enclosures; Unnatural Creation; Revising the Feminine; Versions of the Sublime R