The Works of Charlotte Smith, Part I

ISBN-13: 9781851967896 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 2352 str.

Opis

In recent years the central position held by Charlotte Turner Smith during the formative years of the British Romantic period has become increasingly clear. Although Wordsworth rightly foresaw her status as a poet 'to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered', in our time her fortune has turned and her poetry has been restored to the canon where it manifests a range of metrical experimentation and intellectual resilience unmatched by any other woman poet of the time. Less attention has been paid to Smith's eleven novels and two fictional adaptations from the French because few of these have been reprinted until recently, and the majority have never been reprinted at all.This edition, however, will reveal the extent to which Smith's work in this form constitutes as significant an achievement as her poetry, representing the turbulent decade of the 1790s on its social and political, as well as literary, planes with an unparalleled richness of detail and an unblinkered vision. Whatever subgenres of the novel Smith engages - gothic, sentimental, domestic, political - she informs with her distinctive social consciousness, which in an increasingly repressive climate is steadfastly liberal and broadly inclusive. In her concentration on the plight of women and of those dispossessed by warfare Smith stakes claims far in advance of her time.The same social consciousness and propensity for fictional realism inform the five books that Charlotte Smith wrote for children, none of which has been reprinted before this edition. For scholars increasingly attentive to cultural values embedded in early children's literature, Smith's daring injection of political and class issues into them and her concentration on the natural world as the central text for study will be seen as crucial in the development of this form. Smith writes with a calculated determination to enlarge the sphere of children's comprehension so as to integrate moral, social, scientific and imaginative education. "The Works of Charlotte Smith" restores an essential voice in British Romanticism to the prominence she held in her own time, revealing a writer who wrote well in many genres, and, in whatever form she undertook, was innovative with the forms she inherited and strongly influential on those who followed her.

Spis treści

Part I Volume 1 Manon L'Escaut, or The fatal attachment (1786); The Romance of Real Life (1787) Smith's first two publications in prose are adaptations of French texts in which she first explores the plight of women in a world governed by men's appetites and legal restrictions, themes she will return to throughout her career. Volume 2 Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) Charlotte Smith's first original fiction sets the pattern for the abiding concern of her later novels: how women cope with the restricted choices society offers them. By tracing the intersecting plots of three heroines, she constructs a complicated social fabric that at once satirizes high society and suggestively demonstrates how women can empower themselves amid its constraints. The candour with which she treats women's sexuality here becomes a distinguishing characteristic of all her fiction. Volume 3 Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1789) A darker novel than her first, Ethelinde also enlarges the social spheres and landscapes in which Smith sets her characters, moving effortlessly between a gothic abbey in England 's Lake District and the King's Bench Prison in London , between selfish aristocrats and impoverished virtue, between rural content and the lures of colonial exploitation. Volume 4 Celestina (1791) Smith's growing confidence as a novelist allows her to expand even further the scope of her concerns. Emboldened by the spirit of the first year of the French Revolution, she both enlarges the social worlds in which her heroine functions and moves her fiction between England and a France reinvigorated by its revolutionary energies. With strong political sympathies Charlotte Smith daringly uses her novel to engage in contemporary debates over how Britain should react to sweeping social change. Volume 5 Desmond (1792) Even more politically adventurous, Desmond moves back and forth between France and England , and, as an epistolary novel set between 1790 and 1792, openly reconfigures the recent historical record from a radical perspective.