Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author

Sonia Hofkosh explores the role of gender in early nineteenth-century British literary culture, especially in terms of the simultaneous commercialization and feminization of literature. Examining a wide range of texts, she shows how the development of a female reading audience aroused anxieties in the male writers of the period. The author also considers the ways in which three women writers (Mary Shelley, Sarah Hazlitt and Jane Austen) attempted to negotiate the minefields of a male-dominated literary discourse that rendered the female "invisible."

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.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: invisible girls; 1. A woman's profession: sexual difference and the romance of authorship; 2. The writer's ravishment: Byron's body politics; 3. Classifying romanticism: the milliner girl and the magazines; 4. Disfiguring economies: Mary Shelley's gift-book stories; 5. The author's progress: William Hazlitt's Keswick escapade and Sarah Hazlitt's Journal; 6. Romanticism in the drawing room: Austen's interiority; Notes; List of works cited; Index.

Sonia Hofkosh explores the role of gender in early nineteenth-century British literary culture, especially in terms of the simultaneous commercialization and feminization of literature. Exploring a range of work by writers including Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Austen amongst others, she offers a new perspective on the field of romantic studies.