Charlotte Smith

Romanticism, poetry and the culture of gender

By (author) Jacqueline Labbe

Publication date:

04 January 2011

Length of book:

176 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9780719083211

This book offers a thorough and complete reading of Charlotte Smith's poetry, arguing that we need to engage more directly with historical ideas of gender.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Embodying the author
1. The possibilities of print
2. 'Elegaic Sonnets' I: The good mother
3. 'Elegaic Sonnets' II: The woman in need
4. On the edge: Politics and the strictures of subjectivity in 'The Emigrants'
5. Locating the poet in 'Beachy Head'
Coda: Smith, poetry, Romanticism
Bibliography

One of several new books to insist on crediting nineteenth-century minds with their due measure of sophistication. Labbe argues persuasively that this magisterial persona actively critiques Smith's own earlier poetic practice as well as her culture's fictions of identity.