Elizabeth Fay

A feminist introduction to romanticism

List of Illustrations. List of Women Writers Discussed. 1 A Feminist Approach to Romantic Studies and the Case of Austen. Standard Definitions and Revisions. The Historical Period. Feminist Theory and Romantic Studies. Jane Austen, a Case Study. 2 Women and Politics: Writing Revolution. Letters and the Maternal: Political Metaphors. Revolution as a Frame of Mind. Revolutionary Writing. Maternal Nationalism and Childrena s Literature. 3 Women and the Gothic: Literature as Home Politics. Defining the Gothic. The Gothic as Domestic: Social Critique Gothics. Psychological Drama Gothics. The Romance of Real Life and the Radical Critique. 4 Women and Thought: Intellectual Critique. The Bluestocking Circle in London. Dissent and the Rights of the Home. Women and History. Literary Criticism as Art. Intellectuality and the Years of Reaction. 5 Women and Identity: Visuality in Romantic Texts. Seeing and Seen: The Writer and the Proper Lady. Display and the Specular Heroine. Tableaux Vivants, Theatrics and Burneya s The Wanderer. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

Mary Robinson: On Trial in the Public Court

Trials for Adultery: or, the History of Divorces. Being Select Trials at Doctors Commons for Adultery, Fornication, Cruelty, Impotence, c even in proper or defensible discourses disinterestedness vies with public interest. As the volume title I have taken for my epigraph reveals despite its disclaimer, the historical fact of legal transcriptions is self-interested: narratively framed as the exposure of private acts for public good, the title titillates even as it screens authorial scandal mongering. …

Portrait Galleries, Representative History, and Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age

The eighteenthand nineteenth-century book-form “portrait gallery” is a visual– verbal genre, a volume of plates and essays that imitates both the physical and aesthetic experience of visiting a gallery of painted portraits and supplements this imitation with the readerly experience of perusing a baronetage or biographical sketches. Etchings of full-scale society portraits are faced with the subject’s genealogy or with a biographical essay that attempts to verbally portray the subject through character as much as life history. Placed side by side, “life-writing” and “face-painting,” the image and the word interpenetrate, creating a cross-indexing and dialogue of countering information, for the portrait assumes a certain pose of character and playfulness or staid symbolism, whereas the biographical sketch is detached from the subjective body, a commentary on a life rather than a carefully controlled selfrepresentation. The portrait gallery is an extra-literary product, a coffee table book that offers its visual and verbal portraits as a continuous series. Each portrait is made relative to those that precede and follow it, becoming only one of a sequence that together represent something larger than the individuals depicted. It eventually makes a cultural space for public galleries such as the National Portrait Gallery, opened to the public in 1859, and is complementary to the family portrait galleries of the landed. The seduction of purchasable portrait galleries for consumers is their provision of a peek into the lives of public persons, a seemingly empowering transfer of information from and about another to the self. But this “other” is not real so much as a model for emulation. The purpose of these portrayals moves in an opposing direction from its seduction, no larger a reception of information but a displacement of one’s own selfness (one’s own information) with that of a better self. Voyeurism is mixed up with self-improvement, art with private knowledge, mechanical reproduction with the representation of a socio-cultural now. Moreover, through the cheap replication of extremely expensive society portraits, the portrait gallery mechanizes the consumption and cheapening of elitist markers by the middle classes. It was the very thing Samuel Johnson had warned against: “We know how few can portray a living acquaintance, except by his most prominent and observable particularities, and the grosser features of his mind . . . and how soon a succession of copies will lose all resemblance of the original.” Certainly the reductive methods of the portrait gallery

Atlantic Thinking in Jane Austen’s Novels

Understood in its historical moment, Austen’s fiction can be seen as a reflection on two key aspects of British national identity in a period of historical transformation: England’s strong maritime presence in the Atlantic world and a cultural imaginary based in landed estates. While the interpretation of Mansfield Park has rightly drawn attention to the significance of plantation estates for her fiction, this novel does not exhaust Austen’s Atlanticism. This chapter argues that Austen’s Persuasion articulates a picture of mobility associated with naval life (meritocracy, mapping, ethical individualism), rather than with the culture of the plantation or the landed estate. As a kind of psychological corollary to the British navy’s meritocratic culture, Austen valorizes the fluidity of mind that survives the exigencies of fortune and even profits from them. Seeing Nelson rather than Napoleon, Trafalgar rather than Waterloo, as her ethical model, Austen’s novel is a lesson in engaging with otherness—that is to say, in engaging Atlantically with the world.

Romanticism and Caricature; Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835

come from what M. H. Abrams has called the ‘prosecutorial’ approach of new historicism” (143). Five Long Winters and The Majesty of the People join contemporary efforts that continue to rethink this approach, identifying further connections between poetry and politics in the era and teasing out the nuances of poems written under political pressure. As Bugg notes, Wordsworth was not “operating within a sphere of perfect freedom of expression” (148) and the techniques he and others deployed in order to foreground these limitations, the pressures they negotiated through formal means, and the subjects they chose in order to embody the repressions of the era all attest to a continued but necessarily complex engagement with those impious giants of the Pitt administration who “Thirsted to make the guardian Crook of Law / A tool of Murder” (Prel. 10.646–47).

Romantic Egypt, Monumentality and Shifting Sands

This essay explores an Egypt that is otherwise and elsewhere as what is always prior, serving as an originary vortex, an abyss that is yet a starting point. The unknowable, unverifiable things that Kant labels “cosmological ideas” are precisely the grounding concepts of an occulted Egypt, where it was believed the power of the Logos could be reconstructed, origin could be determined, divine revelation first occurred, and matter, essence, and freedom were part of esoteric teachings. My underlying argument is that Romantic artists and scholars were drawn to Egyptian monuments as spirit-tombs for the same reason they returned to the problem of decoding the hieroglyph: to make Egypt legible and to find in Egypts trace the origin – thus translating that which is unlocatable, a vanishing point, into an origination story. To set forth these ideas I use an unorthodox history coupled with a way to come at that subterranean history; I then turn to a late Romantic-period manuscript of amateur hieroglyphic study that plays out this variant history in coded form.

Grace Aguilar: Rewriting Scott Rewriting History

In this chapter I will use a reading of Grace Aguilar’s Vale of Cedars; or, The Martyr (posthumously published 1850) and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) to center a discussion of Aguilar’s uses of Jewish identity to construct a literary and authorial identity.2 My reading will begin with the observation that Aguilar’s Jewish heroine not only bears the Catholic name “Marie,” but in contrast to Scott’s Orientalized Rebecca, is also unmarked physically, culturally, or behaviorally by her Jewishness.3 Indeed, the secret of being Jewish presents a captivating mysteriousness for the unsuspecting English hero, Arthur Stanley, but it is only decipherable through Marie’s essentializing spirituality, an unstigmatized resource that is the only inheritance from Scott’s Rebecca that Aguilar allows. I want to begin with the steps leading up to this point of departure, and end with an assessment of the complex literary negotiations Aguilar makes.