1st Edition
Vocational Philanthropy and British Women's Writing, 1790�1810 Wollstonecraft, More, Edgeworth, Wordsworth
By Patricia Comitini
Copyright 2005
176 Pages
by
Routledge
176 Pages
by
Routledge
176 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Patricia Comitini's study compels serious rethinking of how literature by women in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries should be read. Beginning with a description of the ways in which evolving conceptions of philanthropy were foundational to constructions of class and gender roles, Comitini argues that these changes enabled a particular kind of feminine benevolence that was linked... Read more
Contents: Introduction; History, philanthropy and benevolent femininity; The benevolent woman: rereading Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Beyond the Polite: Philanthropy and the Politics of 'Popular' Tales; Reforming fiction and the middling classes: Maria Edgeworth's Belinda; More than 'half a poet': Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Patricia Comitini is Associate Professor of English, Quinnipiac University, USA
'... compelling and well-argued... a fresh and lucid introduction, complemented with an intelligent and nuanced reading of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women... Vocational Philanthropy is useful and well-argued, and sets out clearly the historical context and ideological agenda of Romantic-era didactic fiction, as well as elucidating the complex relationship between the private and public spheres that women writers often had to negotiate... an admirable attempt to give us a clearer understanding of a popular and powerful mode of fiction: one which had far greater cachet in its own time that ours and which deserves such unapologetic reassessment.' Romantic Textualities
