ABSTRACT
What difference does gender make to our understanding of British literary Romanticism? Does Romanticism have a gender? In this speculative book, I will argue that our current cultural and scholarly descriptions of that historical phenomenon we call Romanticism are unwittingly gender-biased. Whether we interpret British literary Romanticism as a commitment to imagination, vision and transcendence, as did Meyer Abrams, Harold Bloom and John Beer, or as a questioning, even systematic demystification, of the very possibility of a linguistically unmediated vision, as have Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man and a host of others, or as an ideology located in specific political and social events, as urged by Carl Woodring, Jerome McGann and the school of new historical Romanticists inspired by their work, or as a complex configuration derived from all of these recent critical approaches, we nonetheless have based our constructions of British Romanticism almost exclusively upon the writings and thought of six male poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats).
