Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the founding text of modern feminism. In this sourcebook, Adriana Craciun provides a starting point for readers new to Wollstonecraft's work. Key materials include: letters by Wollstonecraft and important contemporary documents; 19th-century responses to the text; 20th-century critical readings; annotated key passages, cross-referenced to critical texts; and suggestions for further reading. With substantial introductory materials throughout and extensive annotation, this is a useful guide to a key literary and political...

Incarnations of fatal women, or femmes fatales, recur throughout the works of women writers in the Romantic period. Adriana Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of femmes fatales played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities and affected their exploration of issues surrounding the body, sexuality and politics. Craciun covers a wide range of writers and genres from the 1790s through the 1830s and discusses the work of such well-known figures as Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as lesser-known writers like Anne Bannerman. This examination of women writers' fatal...

British Women Writers and the French Revolution provides an overview of a wide range of British women's writings on the French Revolution, from writers sympathetic to the Revolution like Mary Robinson, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith, to anti-revolutionary writers like Hannah More and Jane West. Based on new research in French and British archives and libraries, the book uncovers little-known writings by British women, and argues that these writers developed a distinct antinationalism, in some cases even a feminist cosmopolitanism, in their responses to the European revolutionary...

Craciun demonstrates how portrayals of fatal women played an important role in the development of Romantic women's poetic identities.

This fascinating study examines how Victorian fixation on disastrous Northwest Passage expeditions has conditioned our understanding of the Arctic and Polar exploration.

In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia.