This study argues that protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the expectations of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society, in the radical circles of the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson.

This study argues that protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the expectations of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society, in the radical circles of the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson.

This important collection of review articles makes it possible to trace the critical reputations of both major and minor British Romantic poets at the hands of first their contemporaries and then the principal Victorian critics.
The collection also enables the reader to perceive the growing influence of Romanticism on the thinking of those critics of the second half of the nineteenth century who were instrumental in forming the canon of English Literature and instituting it as a field of study in the universities for the first time.
The four volumes
* include minor figures and...

"Alas the love of women it is known/ To be a lovely and fearful thing " (Don Juan, st. 199) Traditionally seen as an archetypal masculine poet, better known for his relationships with women than for the sympathetic study of them, Lord Byron has not lent himself easily to a feminist critique. In this, the first such example, Caroline Franklin takes an original and polemical standpoint, reading Byron within the setting of the contemporary debate on the nature, role, and rights of women in society. The heroines of Byron's narrative and dramatic verse are considered, not from a biographical...

Awarded the Elma Dangerfield Prize by the International Byron Society in 2013

The nineteenth century is sometimes seen as a lacuna between two literary periods. In terms of women s writing, however, the era between the death of Mary Wollstonecraft and the 1860s feminist movement produced a coherent body of major works, impelled by an ongoing dialogue between Enlightenment feminism and late Romanticism. This study focuses on the dynamic interaction between Lord Byron and Madame de Stael, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, challenging previous...