Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780-1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith / Edition 1

by Claire Knowles

Overview

Arguing that the end of the eighteenth-century witnessed the emergence of an important female poetic tradition, Claire Knowles analyzes the poetry of several key women writing between 1780 and 1860. Knowles provides important context by demonstrating the influence of the Della Cruscans in exposing the constructed and performative nature of the trope of sensibility, a revelation that was met with critical hostility by a literary culture that valorised sincerity. This sets the stage for Charlotte Smith, who pioneers an autobiographical approach to poetic production that places increased emphasis on the connection between the poet's physical body and her body of work. Knowles shows the poets Susan Evance, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning advancing Smith's poetic strategy as they seek to elicit a powerful sympathetic response from readers by highlighting a connection between their actual suffering and the production of poetry. From this environment, a specific tradition in female poetry arises that is identifiable in the work of twentieth-century writers like Sylvia Plath and continues to pertain today. Alongside this new understanding of poetic tradition, Knowles provides an innovative account of the central role of women writers to an emergent late eighteenth-century mass literary culture and traces a crucial discursive shift that takes place in poetic production during this period. She argues that the movement away from the passionate discourse of sensibility in the late eighteenth century to the more contained rhetoric of sentimentality in the early nineteenth had an enormous effect, not only on female poets but also on British literary culture as a whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780754669753
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/28/2009
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Claire Knowles completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne and is currently Lecturer in Literature at La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia.

Table of Contents

Introduction , Claire Knowles; Chapter 1 Understanding Sensibility as Performance: The Della Cruscans, Claire Knowles; Chapter 2 Performing Sincere Sensibility: Charlotte Smith, Claire Knowles; Chapter 3 The Evolution of Sensibility: Susan Evance, Claire Knowles; Chapter 4 Fame and the Limits of Sensibility: Letitia Landon, Claire Knowles; Chapter 5 Rejecting the Script of Sensibility: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Claire Knowles; Chapter 6 Conclusion, Claire Knowles;

Editorial Reviews

'If it is no longer controversial to declare Smith the first Romantic poet, then Knowles's study brings us significantly closer to understanding what this meant for those who followed her.' BARS Bulletin 'With its perceptive close readings of well-known poems (such as Browning’s Aurora Leigh) as well as less familiar ones, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition is a work of cultural recovery that is a welcome addition to the feminist studies bookshelf.' The European Legacy

From the Publisher