Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.

New approaches to women writers and attitudes to women in the Romantic period, principally focused on North America. Focusing on the period from 1770 to 1830, this collection deploys recent thinking on women in the romantic period to define an agenda which will shape studies in this area into the next century. Investigating issues of class and gender, imperalism and gender identity, and gender and genre, the essays range widely over women and women's affairs during the period, and include pieces on such important writers as Emily Dickinson, Letitia Landon, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Recent developments in the theory and practice of feminist literary criticism are used to reassess the literature of the period, and to interrogate the notion of romanticism, both as a conceptual model and as a periodbounded by dates and geographical restrictions. As a whole, the volume raises questions about gendered romanticism in America, about the surge of romantic poetics in mid-century, and about the appropriation of gendered romanticism by fin-de-siecle writers. Dr ANNE JANOWITZteaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Contributors: GARY KELLY, MARY FAVRET, WILLIAM KEACH, JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH, SONIA HOFKOSH, EMMA FRANCIS, DARIA DONNELLY, BRIDGET BENNETT, IRA LIVINGSTON

Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.

Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the first collection of essays on poet and public intellectual Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825). By international scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, these new essays survey Barbauld's writing from early to late: her versatility as a stylist, her poetry, her books for children, her political writing, her performance as editor and reviewer. They explore themes of sociability, materiality, and affect in Barbauld's writing, and trace her reception and influence. Rooted in enlightenment philosophy and ethics and dissenting religion, Barbauld's work exerted a huge impact on the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on education and ideas about childhood far into the nineteenth century. William McCarthy's introduction explores the importance of Barbauld's work today, and co-editor Olivia Murphy assesses the commentary on Barbauld that followed her rediscovery in the early 1990s. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the indispensible introduction to Barbauld's work and current thinking about it.