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List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Expansion and Contraction: Coleridge’s Gendered Revolt against Materialism
Chapter 2: Coleridge and Robinson: “Sense unchained”
Chapter 3:Secondary Imagination, Contamination, and Androgyny: Christabel, Magnum Opus, and the Nature of Evil
Chapter 4: Re-thinking Literary Influence: Nondual Relationships of Gender and Generation in Robinson, Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Kathryn S. Freeman is Professor of English at the University of Miami, USA.
Summary
Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson and Mary Shelley, this book uses key concepts of androgyny, subjectivity and the re-creative as a productive framework to trace the fascinating textual interactions and dialogues among these authors. It crosses the boundary between male and female writers of the Romantic period by linking representations of gender with late Enlightenment upheavals regarding creativity and subjectivity, demonstrating how these interrelated concerns dismantle traditional binaries separating the canonical and the noncanonical; male and female; poetry and prose; good and evil; subject and object.
Through the convergences among the writings of Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley, the book argues that each dismantles and reconfigures subjectivity as androgynous and amoral, subverting the centrality of the male gaze associated with canonical Romanticism. In doing so, it examines key works from each author's oeuvre, from Coleridge’s “canonical” poems such as Rime of the Ancient Mariner, through Robinson’s lyrical poetry and novels such as Walsingham, to Mary Shelley’s fiction, including Frankenstein, Mathilda, and The Last Man.
Foreword
Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson and Mary Shelley, this book uses key concepts of androgyny, subjectivity and the re-creative as a productive framework to trace the fascinating textual interactions and dialogues between these authors. In doing so it links representations of gender with late Enlightenment upheavals regarding creativity and subjectivity.
Additional text
For those of us who teach and interpret Coleridge’s poetry and works by women writers, Rethinking the Romantic Era is an engaging and valuable study.
