Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 (Paperback)

British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travels in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces, and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the laboring classes, and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the "man of taste" as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls's study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources might be at the peripheries of empire rather than at its center.

General

Imprint:	Cambridge UniversityPress
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Release date:	June 2004
First published:	1995
Authors:	Elizabeth A. Bohls
Dimensions:	229 x 153 x 19mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	324
ISBN-13:	978-0-521-60710-0
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
LSN:	0-521-60710-8
Barcode:	9780521607100

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