Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author

by Sonia Hofkosh

Overview

Sonia Hofkosh explores the role of gender in early nineteenth-century British literary culture, especially in terms of the simultaneous commercialization and feminization of literature. Examining a wide range of texts, she shows how the development of a female reading audience aroused anxieties in the male writers of the period. The author also considers the ways in which three women writers (Mary Shelley, Sarah Hazlitt and Jane Austen) attempted to negotiate the minefields of a male-dominated literary discourse that rendered the female "invisible."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521496544
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/18/1998
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #29
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.71(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"With its acute sense of the workings of rhetoric in relation to the material world, its eye for the suggestive passage and phrase, and its attention to the persistence of the past in our own critical discourse, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Aurthor provides a resonant meditation on gender and authorsip, one whose implications extend beyond strictly romantic studies." Modern Philology

"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

From the Publisher