Real and Imagined Women in British Romanticism uses feminist ideology and deconstructive criticism to reconstruct the cultural context embedded in Romantic canonical texts. To achieve this end, the book undertakes a close textual study of these texts and places them in the intellectual context of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of culture. As a result of intellectual contextualizing as well as theoretical applications, the Romantic imagination, as represented by William Wordsworth and John Keats, emerges as the place where gender division and gender certitude break down. This book intervenes in the traditional critical debates about the Romantic imagination to show that the Romantic imagination, as set forth in these texts, registers the vigorous cultural politics of gender and aesthetics that defined the 1790s and continued to exert influence for decades.

Autorentext

The Author: Gaura Shankar Narayan earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University, where she specialized in romanticism and feminism. She currently teaches at the State University of New York at Purchase. She has recently contributed an article on Salman Rushdie s Midnight Children to the critical anthology, Narrative Beginnings.

Zusammenfassung
Uses feminist ideology and deconstructive criticism to reconstruct the cultural context embedded in Romantic canonical texts. This book undertakes a study of these texts and places them in the intellectual context of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of culture.