This book examines professional literary criticism by Romantic-era British women to reveal that, while developing a conscious professionalism, women literary critics helped to shape the aesthetic models that defined Romantic-era literary values and made the British literary heritage a source of national pride. Women critics understood the contested nature of aesthetics and the public implications of aesthetic values on questions such as morality, both public and private, the nation's cultural heritage, even the essential qualities of Britishness itself.

'This is a remarkable, landmark study in the field of literary scholarship. There has never been anything quite like it, and what it has to offer is badly needed. Not only will it forever alter the way we see the careers of the particular women reviewers under discussion (Anna Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Moody and Harriet Martineau), but, more significantly, it will transform the way we view the history and development of literary criticism in England... This important contribution to the field of English Romantic studies brings to the fore the collaborative nature of literary production.' - Paula R. Feldman, C. Wallace Martin Professor of English, University of South Carolina

Autorentext
MARY A. WATERS is Assistant Professor at Wichita State University, Kansas, USA. Her previous publications include articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies and Nineteenth-Century Studies .

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: "FORMS SCIENTIFIC AND ESTABLISHED" - THE CRITICAL PREFACE, THE CANON, AND THE WOMAN CRITIC The British Common Reader: Critical Prefaces by Anna Letitia Barbauld Renouncing the Forms: The Case of Elizabeth Inchbald PART II: "FEARFUL ASCENDENCY" - WOMEN PERIODICAL LITERARY REVIEWERS "The first of a new genus-": Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and The Analytical Review Periodicals and Middle-Class Dissent: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Moody at the Monthly Review The Next Generation: Harriet Martineau's Literary Reviews for the Monthly Repository Notes Bibliography Index