Romantic Interactions - Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action

In Romantic Interactions, Susan J. Wolfson examines how interaction with other authors-whether on the bookshelf, in the embodied company of someone else writing, or in relation to literary celebrity-shaped the work of some of the best-known (and less well-known) writers in the English language. Working across the arc of Long Romanticism, from the 1780s to the 1840s, this lively study involves writing by women and men, in poetry and prose. Combining careful readings with sophisticated literary, historical, and cultural criticism, Wolfson reveals how various writers came to define themselves as "author." The story unfolds not only in deft textual analyses but also by provocatively placing writers in dialogue with what they were reading, with one another, and with the community of readers (and writers) their writings helped bring into being: Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith in the Revolution-roiled 1790s; William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth in the society of the Lake District; Lord Byron, a magnet for writers everywhere, inspired, troubled, but always arrested by what he (and his scandal-ridden celebrity) represented. This fresh, informative account of key writers, important texts, and complex cultural currents promises keen interest for students and scholars, literary critics, and cultural historians.Table of ContentList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsNote on TextsIntroduction: "The will of a social being"I. Two Women & Poetic Tradition1. Charlotte Smith's Emigrants and the Politics of Allusion2. Mary Wollstonecraft: Re:Reading the Poets3. The Poets' "Wollstonecraft"II. Gender Interactions, Generative Interactions: Two Wordsworths4. Lyrical Ballads and the Pregnant Words of Men's Passions5. William's Sister: Alternatives of Alter Ego6. Dorothy's Conversation with WilliamIII. A Public Attraction7. Gazing on "Byron": Separation and Fascination8. Byron and the Muse of Female PoetryNotesWorks CitedIndexReview QuoteSusan Wolfson is not afraid to profess the study of literature. Her impressive body of work has reasserted the claims of close reading and formal literary values in the face (or the wake) of New Historical and other forms of social, materialist criticism which have tended to reduce poetic texts to the socio-political arguments that can be based on-or against-them. Yet she does this not in simple reaction to what has become a very prevailing trend in the field of Romantic criticism, but with a keen alertness to the moral issues raised in Romantic poetry, especially when they involve the status of women, and particularly women writers, then and now. The present book takes a further step in this direction by investigating poetic language and feminist issues, including the possibly 'feminine' valences of poetry itself. Its procedure is highly intertextual, reading texts back and forth, for and against, each other. New Books on Literature 19 2010 Wolfson employs historicizing criticism to study the relationship between Romantic authors' subjective agency and social connections. Choice 2011Biographical NoteSusan J. Wolfson is a professor of English at Princeton University and author of many essays on and editions of Romantic-era writers. Her books include The Questioning Presence; Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism; and, most recently, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism.