Even as Romantic-period authors asserted the importance of telling the unvarnished truth, novelists were deploying narrative glossing in particularly sophisticated forms. The author examines the artistic craft and political engagement of three major women novelists-Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson-whose self-conscious use of glosses facilitated their critiques of politics and society. All three writers employed devices such as prefaces and editorial notes, as well as alternative media, especially painting and drama, to comment on the narrative. The effect of these disparate media, the author argues, is to call the reader's attention away from the narrative itself. That is, such glossing or 'varnishing' creates narrative ruptures that offer the reader a glimpse of the process of fictional structuring and often reveal the novel's indebtedness to a particular historical moment. In spite, or perhaps because, of their being gendered feminine in eighteenth-century rhetorical commentary, therefore, these glosses allow women writers to participate in 'masculine' discussions outside the conventional domestic sphere. Informed by a wide range of archival texts and examples from the visual arts, and highlighting the 1798 Irish Rebellion as a major event in Irish and British Romantic writing, the author's study offers a new interdisciplinary reading of gendered and political responses to key events in the history of Romanticism.

Recently there has been a growing scholarly interest in Sydney, Lady Morgan (nee Sydney Owenson). The reasons are many. In this work Dr.Donovan contextualizes an important yet relatively neglected author by analyzing an emblematic Irishness that was too often dismissed in the early 19th century as excessive showmanship; the criticism was not without some basis since Owenson was an actor's daughter and grew up in the company of traveling performers. The study includes an extensive discussion of Morgan's personal papers and artifacts housed in the national Library of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy. No previous study has fully considered this crucial archival material and its implications. In addition unpublished and hitherto unconsulted papers from the Yale University collection are also part of this original research monograph. Owenson's writing is far ranging (she is known both as a polemicist and the author of works on post restoration Italy as well as Ireland) and she commanded the friendship and respect of many early 19th c authors and poets including Byron, Shelley, Moore among many others. The table of contents includes: Introduction Body, Text and Textile in "The Wild Irish Girl" Sydney Owenson's Self-Fashioning How Sydney Owenson Played the Harp Ireland in Europe and the World: Sydney Owenson's Travel Writing Owenson in the 19th Century Irish Research Series, No.55

In the first book-length study of the well-respected and popular British writer Elizabeth Hamilton, Claire Grogan addresses a significant gap in scholarship that enlarges and complicates critical understanding of the Romantic woman writer. From 1797 to 1818, Hamilton published in a wide range of genres, including novels, satires, historical and educational treatises, and historical biography. Because she wrote from a politically centrist position during a revolutionary age, Grogan suggests, Hamilton has been neglected in favor of authors who fit within the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin framework used to situate women writers of the period. Grogan draws attention to the inadequacies of the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin binary for understanding writers like Hamilton, arguing that Hamilton and other women writers engaged with and debated the issues of the day in more veiled ways. For example, while Hamilton did not argue for sexual emancipation à la Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, she asserted her rights in other ways. Hamilton's most radical advance, Grogan shows, was in her deployment of genre, whether she was mixing genres, creating new generic medleys, or assuming competence in a hitherto male-dominated genre. With Hamilton serving as her case study, Grogan persuasively argues for new strategies to uncover the means by which women writers participated in the revolutionary debate.

This Palgrave Pivot offers new readings of Maria Edgeworth’s representations of slavery. It shows how Edgeworth employed satiric technique and intertextual allusion to represent discourses of slavery and abolition as a litmus test of character – one that she invites readers to use on themselves. Over the course of her career, Edgeworth repeatedly indicted hypocritical and hyperbolic misappropriation of the sentimental rhetoric that dominated the slavery debate. This book offers new readings of canonical Edgeworth texts as well as of largely neglected works, including: Whim for Whim, “The Good Aunt”, Belinda, “The Grateful Negro”, “The Two Guardians”, and Harry and Lucy Continued. It also offers an unprecedented deep-dive into an important Romantic Era woman writer’s engagement with discourses of slavery and abolition.

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers overviews critical reception for Romantic women writers from their earliest periodical reviews through the most current scholarship and directs users to avenues of future research. It is divided into two parts.The first section offers topical discussions on the status of provincial poets, on women’s engagement in children’s literature, the relation of women writers to their religious backgrounds, the historical backgrounds to women’s orientalism, and their engagement in debates on slavery and abolition.The second part surveys the life and careers of individual women – some 47 in all with sections for biography, biographical resources, works, modern editions, archival holdings, critical reception, and avenues for further research. The final sections of each essay offer further guidance for researchers, including “Signatures” under which the author published, and a “List of Works” accompanied, whenever possible, with contemporary prices and publishing formats. To facilitate research, a robust “Works Cited” includes all texts mentioned or quoted in the essay.

Tracing the rise of conduct literature and the didactic novel over the course of the eighteenth century, this book explores how British women used the didactic novel genre to engage in political debate during and immediately after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Although didactic novels were frequently conventional in structure, they provided a venue for women to uphold, to undermine, to interrogate, but most importantly, to write about acceptable social codes and values. The essays discuss the multifaceted ways in which didacticism and women’s writing were connected and demonstrate the reforming potential of this feminine and ostensibly constricting genre. Focusing on works by novelists from Jane West to Susan Ferrier, the collection argues that didactic novels within these decades were particularly feminine; that they were among the few acceptable ways by which women could participate in public political debate; and that they often blurred political and ideological boundaries. The first part addresses both conservative and radical texts of the 1790s to show their shared focus on institutional reform and indebtedness to Mary Wollstonecraft, despite their large ideological range. In the second part, the ideas of Hannah More influence the ways authors after the French revolution often linked the didactic with domestic improvement and national unity. The essays demonstrate the means by which the didactic genre works as a corrective not just on a personal and individual level, but at the political level through its focus on issues such as inheritance, slavery, the roles of women and children, the limits of the novel, and English and Scottish nationalism. This book offers a comprehensive and wide-ranging picture of how women with various ideological and educational foundations were involved in British political discourse during a time of radical partisanship and social change.

This collection by leading scholars in the field provides a fascinating and ground-breaking introduction to current research in Irish Romantic studies. It proves the international scope and aesthetic appeal of Irish writing in this period, and shows the importance of Ireland to wider currents in Romanticism.

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities

A self-described “disappointed Author”, Charles Robert Maturin (1780-1824) has been largely relegated to the margins of literary history since his death in 1824. Yet, as this study demonstrates, he exerted a fundamental influence on the development of Irish fiction in the early nineteenth century. In particular, his novels dramatically underscore the continuing presence and deployment of the Gothic mode in Romantic Ireland – an influence now frequently overlooked in critical attention to the national and regional forms popularized in Ireland in the wake of Anglo-Irish Union (1801). Working from Jacques Derrida’s influential theory on ghosts, this study positions Maturin as the cornerstone on which to build a new paradigm of Irish Romantic fiction, one which accounts for the spectral traces of the past – cultural, social, and political – evident in early-nineteenth century Irish fiction. As it does so, it calls for renewed critical and popular attention to an author who himself continues spectrally to emerge in the works of his literary successors.

Claire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inheritance. Their openness to contemporary politics, as well as to recent historiography, antiquarian scholarship, poetry, song, plays and memoirs, produced a series of notable fictions; marked most of all by their ability to fashion from these resources a new vocabulary of cultural identity. This book extends and enriches the current understanding of Irish Romanticism, blending sympathetic textual analysis of the fiction with careful historical contextualization.