1st Edition
Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era
By Elizabeth A. Dolan
Copyright 2008
260 Pages
by
Routledge
260 Pages
by
Routledge
260 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Arguing that vision was the dominant mode for understanding suffering in the Romantic era, Elizabeth A. Dolan shows that Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley experimented with aesthetic and scientific visual methods in order to expose the social structures underlying suffering. Dolan's exploration of illness, healing, and social justice in the writings of these three authors... Read more
Contents: Introduction; Part 1 Illness: Melancholia and the poetics of visibility: Charlotte Smith's Elegaic Sonnets; Contagion, sympathy, invisibility: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Part 2 Healing: The journey to heal melancholia: Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters fron Norway; Scientific botany as therapy: Charlotte Smith's literature; Invisibility and the history of trauma: Mary Shelley's Rambles in Germany and Italy. Part 3 Social Justice: Seeing poverty: Smith's Rural Walks and Wollstonecraft's Original Stories as fictional ethnography; Unsentimental seeing: Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman and didactic children's literature; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Elizabeth A. Dolan is associate professor of English at Lehigh University, USA.
'Elizabeth Dolan significantly modifies and deepens our understanding of the Romantic period, as she connects apparently disparate critical trajectories: medical understandings of the physiology of the eye, aesthetic and scientific modalities of seeing, and the discourse of suffering underlying social movements. Women writers, she argues, use this new knowledge to express their own subjectivity in innovative ways. Dolan reads Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley across genres and as they explode gendered constraints to visualize the suffering of neglected Others in radical and unavoidable ways.' Gina Luria Walker, New School University, USA ’... Recommended.’ Choice '... wide-ranging, interesting...' Keats-Shelley Journal
