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Redefines Mary Wollstonecraft as a multi-lingual cosmopolitan Considering her transformation of material from the works of European writers and orators such as Rousseau, Mirabeau, 'Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Margareta de Cambon, as well as British sentimental philosophers and the radical theologian Richard Price, this book argues that Wollstonecraft espouses a cosmopolitan ethic that subordinates local and national allegiances to philanthropy, or love of humankind. At a time of international conflict, burgeoning capitalism and colonial enterprise, she represents philanthropy and cultural authenticity as the means to resist tyranny and imperialism in all their forms and light the way to global justice. Laura Kirkley is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University.
This book offers an insightful look at the development of feminist theory through a literary lens. Stressing the significance of feminism's origins in the European Enlightenment, it traces the literary careers of feminism's major thinkers in order to elucidate the connection of feminist theoretical production to literary work.
Crossing Cultures brings together scholars in the field of reception and translation studies to chart the individual and institutional agencies that determined the reception of Anglophone authors in the Dutch and Belgian literary fields in the course of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The essays offer a variety of angles from which nineteenth-century literary dynamics in the Low Countries can be studied. The first two parts discuss the reception of Anglophone literature in the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively, while the third part focuses exclusively on the Dutch translation of women writers.
Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. Lyric poetry is especially concerned with things and their relationship to thought, sense, and understanding. In Romantic Things, Mary Jacobus explores the world of objects and phenomena in nature as expressed in Romantic poetry alongside the theme of sentience and sensory deprivation in literature and art. Jacobus discusses objects and attributes that test our perceptions and preoccupy both Romantic poetry and modern philosophy. John Clare, John Constable, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. G. Sebald, and Gerhard Richter make appearances around the central figure of William Wordsworth as Jacobus explores trees, rocks, clouds, breath, sleep, deafness, and blindness in their work. While she thinks through these things, she is assisted by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Helping us think more deeply about things that are at once visible and invisible, seen and unseen, felt and unfeeling, Romantic Things opens our eyes to what has been previously overlooked in lyric and Romantic poetry.
Interest in the work of Eliza Haywood has increased greatly over the last two decades. Though much scholarship is focused on her ‘scandalous’ early career, this critical edition of The Invisible Spy (1755) adds to the canon of her later, more sophisticated work.
Focuses on women writers as translators who interpreted and mediated across cultural boundaries and between national contexts in the period 1700-1900. Rejecting from the outset the notion of translations as 'defective females', each essay engages with the author it discusses as an innovator.
Family Annals, or the Sisters, Mary Hays's last novel, was originally published in 1817. This philosophically complex novel examines the themes of the importance of women's education, economic equality of the sexes, and general equality among all human beings. This edition of Family Annals, with a new introduction and editorial commentary by Li-ching Chen, will be of interest to scholars and students of the writing of the Romantic and Victorian eras. It will contribute to various debates about women's education in the nineteenth century, and will provide a new avenue of research in women's writing.
This monograph reorients discussion of Blake’s prophetic mode, revealing it to be not a system in any formal sense, but a dynamic, human response to an era of momentous historical change when the future Blake had foreseen and the reality he was faced with could not be reconciled. At every stage, Blake’s writing confronts the central problem of all politically minded literature: how texts can become action. Yet he presents us with no single or, indeed, conclusive answer to this question and in this sense it can be said that he fails. Blake, however, never stopped searching for a way that prophecy might be made to live up to its promise in the present. The twentieth-century hermeneuticist Paul Ricoeur shared with Blake a preoccupation with the relationship between time, text and action. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics thus provide a fresh theoretical framework through which to analyse Blake’s attempts to fulfil his prophetic purpose.
Christian Isobel Johnstone’s Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published in 1815, less than a year after Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since enthralled readers and initiated a craze for Scottish novels. Both as a novelist and as editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine from 1834 to 1846, Johnstone was a powerful figure in Romantic Edinburgh’s literary scene. But her works and her reputation have long been overshadowed by Scott’s. In Clan-Albin, Johnstone engages with themes on British imperial expansion, metropolitan England’s economic and political relationships with the Celtic peripheries, and the role of women in public life. This rare novel, alongside extensive editorial commentary, will be of much interest to students of British Literature.
This provocative and timely volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the 'age of revolutions' from 1750 to 1850 - a period which was marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and to rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceived the fairness of a given legal order and worked with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of 'epistemic injustice' to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of 'justice' and 'equity' and aid efforts to humanise the rule of law.