Women, epic, and transition in British romanticism / Elisa Beshero-Bondar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Beshero-Bondar, Elisa, 1971-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--Women authors--History and criticism.

English poetry.

English poetry--Women authors.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Great Britain.

Women and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Women and literature.

History.

Epic poetry, English--History and criticism.

Epic poetry, English.

Physical Description:

xi, 253 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2011]

Summary:

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women poets challenged longstanding categorical approaches to gender and nation in the epic tradition, and they raised politically charged questions about women's importance in moments of historical crisis.

While Romantic epics did not all engage in radical questioning or undermining of authority, this study calls attention to some of the more provocative poems in their approach to gender, culture, and history. This study prioritizes long poems written by and about women during the Romantic era, and does so in context with influential epics by male contemporaries. The book takes its cue from a dramatic increase in the publication of epics and epical poems in the early nineteenth century. At their most innovative, Romantic epics provoked questions about the construction of ideological meaning and historical memory, and they centralized women's experiences in entirely new ways to reflect on defeat, loss, and inevitable transition. For the first time the epic became an attractive genre for ambitious women poets.

This book offers a timely response to recent groundbreaking scholarship on the nineteenth-century epic by Herbert Tucker and Simon Dentith and should be of interest to Romanticists and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and history, gender and genre, and women's studies. Book jacket.

Contents:

Affective historiography in poetry: women and time in romantic epic

Feminizing the epic tradition: romantic echoes of Spenser and Milton

Medieval minstrelsy and the female curse on history

Mary Russell Mitford on Lord Byron's new and old world territories

Oriental mysticism and human forms divine: psyche's erotic revolution.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611490701

1611490707

9781611490718

1611490715

OCLC:

703871118