ABSTRACT
As my last two chapters have tried to show, the binary oppositions of masculine and feminine Romanticism become far more complexly interwoven when we scrutinize individual authors and specific works. Yet the tension created by gender difference remains central to the structure, the content and the production of Romantic literary texts. In the future we can no longer continue to speak monolithically of “British Romanticism,” of a “Romantic spirit of the age,” of “the Romantic ideology.” If we are to present ourselves as students and teachers of literary Romanticism, we can no longer confine our attention to the work of the six canonical male poets. In conversation and contestation with masculine Romanticism, we must learn to hear at the very least one other voice, what I have been calling feminine Romanticism.
