Mary Robinson's work has begun again to assume a central place in discussions of Romanticism. A writer of the 1790's-a decade which saw the birth of Romanticism, revolution, and enormous popular engagement with political ideas-Robinson was acknowledged in her time as a leading poet. Her writing exhibits great variety: charm, theatricality, and emotional resonance are all characteristics Robinson displays. She was by turns a poet of sensibility, a poet of popular culture, a chronicler of the major events of the time, and a participant in some of its chief aesthetic innovations. This long-awaited collection is the first critical edition of her poems.

"This book is . . . a romantic history of romantic collecting. It takes seriously, and by necessity shares, the tendency of romantic histories to dwell upon their own fragmentariness, on the impossibility of capturing an intact history. . . . It traces the particular ways in which objects stepped into the lives of romantic collectors, and also the ways in which the objects moved on."-from the IntroductionIn the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the activity of collecting became democratized and popularized, allowing all kinds of people to become caught up in the collecting obsessions of the period: birds, books, Napoleonic relics, botanical specimens, Egyptiana, and fossils. Judith Pascoe invites readers to contemplate the ongoing allure of romantic collections. Pascoe maintains that romanticism as a literary movement played a crucial supporting role in varied attempts by collectors of this era to fashion identities for themselves through collecting. She links the collecting craze during the period with the subsequent fetishization of romantic poets and their possessions, revealing the extent to which an ongoing fascination with material objects-with Keats's hair and Shelley's guitar, for example-helped to produce an enduring image of these poets as spiritual emissaries of a less materialistic age. In language both witty and idiosyncratic, Pascoe makes the case that the romantic period stands out as a distinct moment in collecting history, a transition between the flourishing of the Renaissance wonder cabinet and the rise of the Victorian museum.

The eleven contributors to "The Girl's Own" explore British and American Victorian representations of the adolescent girl by drawing on such contemporary sources as conduct books, housekeeping manuals, periodicals, biographies, photographs, paintings, and educational treatises. The institutions, practices, and literatures discussed reveal the ways in which the Girl expressed her independence, as well as the ways in which she was presented and controlled. As the contributors note, nineteenth-century visions of girlhood were extremely ambiguous. The adolescent girl was a fascinating and troubling figure to Victorian commentators, especially in debates surrounding female sexuality and behavior.
"The Girl's Own" combines literary and cultural history in its discussion of both British and American texts and practices. Among the topics addressed are the nineteenth-century attempt to link morality and diet; the making of heroines in biographies for girls; Lewis Carroll's and John Millais's iconographies of girlhood in, respectively, their photographs and paintings; genre fiction for and by girls; and the effort to reincorporate teenage unwed mothers into the domestic life of Victorian America.