Minerva's Gothics - The Politics and Poetics of Romantic Exchange, 1780-1820
Publisher: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru / University of Wales Press
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781786833679
Subjects: English literature
Description: Between 1790 and 1820, William Lane&#x2019;s Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of new novels by female authors. Reading these novels for their shared popular conventions demonstrates that circulating-library novelists collectively recirculate, engage and modify commonplaces about women&#x2019;s nature, the social order and, most importantly, the very same Romantic redefinitions of literature that still render their novels not worth reading. Elizabeth Neiman&#x2019;s analysis shows that Minerva novelists write and authorize a collaborative authorial model, and that this model reverberates in Romantic poetics&#x2014;most notably, Percy Shelley&#x2019;s portrayal of the idealized poet in A Defence of Poetry.