ABSTRACT
In the past three or four decades, feminist literary history has transformed studies in Romanticism, along with studies in other periods. Such feminist history has not only retrieved many writers and texts from historical oblivion, but also altered our understanding of Romanticism and its history and challenged the limits of history and practice of historiography in the interests of feminism, variously defined. Such feminist history has, furthermore, begun to question conventional limits and definitions of historiography, revealing that the discourse of history has been practiced, especially by women, in discourses beyond historiography as conventionally and historically understood. At the same time, feminist historicists and historicist feminists have attempted to resolve two major challenges to feminist history and its evident usefulness—the challenge of historicism to modern feminism’s concern for the present and the challenge of poststructuralism to the conventions, integrity, authority, and usefulness of historiography.
