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Communities: Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Romanticism
Author(s) -
Labbe Jacqueline
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00093.x
Subject(s) - romanticism , poetry , romance , set (abstract data type) , literature , psychology , variation (astronomy) , function (biology) , art , computer science , biology , physics , evolutionary biology , astrophysics , programming language
Abstract It has become a critical commonplace to speak of “women's writing” or “women's poetry” as if this is a discrete and recognizable category, with a firm and accepted set of parameters. From here we have evolved an idea of textual “community” that is gender‐based. In this essay, I question the validity of the category, which has no “men's writing” counterpart. I also offer a new understanding of “community,” one which recognizes techniques of poetic variation and pseudonymity. Using three female writers as exemplars, I conclude that a vision of Romantic community derived from particularities of Romantic poetic form is not gender‐based but rather a function of Romanticism itself.