Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author

Download or read book Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author written by Sonia Hofkosh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring a range of early nineteenth-century cultural materials from canonical poetry and critical prose to women's magazines and gift-book engravings, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author offers new perspectives on the role of gender in Romanticism's defining paradigms of authorship. The Romantic author's claim to individual agency is complicated by its articulation in a market system perceived to be impelled in large part by fantasies of female desire - by what women read and write, what they buy and sell, how they look, and where they look for pleasure. These studies in the contested public spaces of literary labour elaborate the fundamental, if invisible, function of the woman as embodiment of authorial ambivalence in writing by Austen, Byron, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Sarah Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and others.