Andrew O. Winckles is Assistant Professor of CORE Curriculum (Interdisciplinary Studies) at Adrian College. Angela Rehbein is Associate Professor of English at West Liberty University.

A wide-ranging and accessible account of the pioneering professional women writers who flourished during the Romantic period.

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.

This 2002 volume explores the often overlooked social networks of Romantic figures.

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 Staël, Lady Morgan, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, challenging previous critics’ segregation of the male Romantic writers from their female peers. The Romantic movement in general unleashed the creative ambitions of nineteenth-century female novelists, and the public voice of Byron in particular engaged them in transnational issues of political, national and sexual freedom. Byronism had itself been shaped by the poet’s incursion onto a literary scene where women readers were dominant and formidable intellectuals such as Madame de Staël were lionized. Byron engaged in rivalrous dialogue with the novels of his female friends and contemporaries, such as Caroline Lamb, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, whose critiques of Romantic egotism helped prompt his own self-parody in Don Juan. Later Victorian novelists, such as George Sand, the Brontë sisters and Harriet Beecher Stowe, wove their rejection of their childhood attraction to Byronism, and their dawning awareness of the significance for women of Lady Byron’s actions, into the feminist fabric of their art.

This book explores Della Cruscan poetry in the late eighteenth-century literary scene. A sociable, ornate, and deeply theatrical type of poetry, Della Cruscanism was associated with writers like Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Cowley. While Merry is the poet most commonly associated with the Della Cruscan school, this book argues that Della Cruscanism was a movement dominated by female poets and that this was one of the key reasons for the later disavowal and downgrading of its poetic accomplishments. It offers a close examination of these women writers and their role in shaping the poetic culture of the fashionable newspaper. In doing so, this study offers the first account of the feminization of the fashionable newspaper and of popular literary culture in the final years of the eighteenth century.

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism is the first book-length work to explore the interrelationships between contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The music and videos of contemporary musicians including Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Hélène Cixous, Missy Elliot, the Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monáe, Alanis Morrisette, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), and Alice Walker are explored through the lenses of pastoral and Afropresentism, Gothic, female Gothic, and the literature of William Blake, Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth to explore how each sheds light on the other, and how women have appropriated, responded to, and been inspired by the work of authors from previous centuries.

The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.

This project has several distinctive features. The first is statistical analysis of publishing records for all British novels (Minerva and otherwise) published between 1780 and 1829 (data are compiled from James Raven’s and Peter Garside’s The English Novel, 1770-1829: a Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles). This analysis confirms that Minerva novelists are more prolific than most female novelists in the period. It is rarely noted that Minerva novelists also often publish on occasion with other presses, something to which the data calls attention. The book’s scope and content challenges an anachronism that still permeates studies of the Romantic era. Minerva’s Gothics restores a forgotten pathway between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet.

Romantic Androgyny is the first study to systematically apply the currents of French and Anglo-American feminist literary criticism to an analysis of the major poetry of the Romantic period. Diane Hoeveler argues that Romantic male poets self-consciously employed the feminine as "Other" and as an alternative source of value in order to engage in a fictional completion of their own psyches. Furthermore, a large proportion of the "women" in the poetry of the major Romantics cannot be understood apart from this radical metaphoric tradition of literary absorption. Because of the power of the feminine as "Other," women in English Romantic poetry have been on the one hand idealized and on the other denigrated by critics in the field. Hoeveler attempts to correct the flaws of both views by placing the various images of women into a psychoanalytical and historical framework. All six canonical poets participated in one of their culture's dominant ideological fantasies that imaginative creativity was possible for males only if they absorbed the feminine principle and thus became androgynous. Romantic Androgyny argues that the images of the symbolic woman were determined by the poets' adherence to the ideologies of both androgyny and the Eternal Feminine that permeated late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.