Overview

Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism argues that early nineteenth-century women poets contributed some of the most daring work in modernizing the epic genre. The book examines several long poems to provide perspective on women poets working with and against men in related efforts, contributing together to a Romantic movement of large-scale genre revision. Women poets challenged longstanding categorical approaches to gender and nation in the epic tradition, and they raised politically charged questions about women's importance in moments of historical crisis. While Romantic epics did not all engage in radical questioning or undermining of authority, this study calls attention to some of the more provocative poems in their approach to gender, culture, and history. This study prioritizes long poems written by and about women during the Romantic era, and does so in context with influential epics by male contemporaries. The book takes its cue from a dramatic increase in the publication of epics in the early nineteenth-century. At their most innovative, Romantic epics provoked questions about the construction of ideological meaning and historical memory, and they centralized women's experiences in entirely new ways to reflect on defeat, loss, and inevitable transition. For the first time the epic became an attractive genre for ambitious women poets. The book offers a timely response to recent groundbreaking scholarship on nineteenth-century epic by Herbert Tucker and Simon Dentith, and should be of interest to Romanticists and scholars of 18th- and 19th-century literature and history, gender and genre, and women's studies. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.  

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9781644531211

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Reviews

Elisa Beshero-Bondar's Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism will change the [assumption that the Romantic period] was a thoroughly masculine genre...The book places the work of Mitford, Mary Tighe, Margaret Holford, Matilda Betham, and Margaret Compton in contact with epics by Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Byron, and others. Epics by women may emphasize women, but, Beshero-Bondar shows, female experience was in many ways central to the genre as a whole...Beshero-Bondar's recovery of her five key women epic writers is her most influential act. These poems reveal a fascinating engagement with classical form which imagines often startling shifts in the relation of poetry to history.--The Year's Work In English Studies

Author Information

Elisa Beshero-Bondar is Program Chair, Digital Media, Arts, and Technology and Professor of Digital Humanities, Digital Media, Arts, and Technology at Penn State University.

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