Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716 1818
(Part of the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism Series)
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Book Overview
British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travel in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces, and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the labouring classes, and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls' study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources at the peripheries of empire rather than at its centre.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0521607108
ISBN13:9780521607100
Release Date:June 2004
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Length:324 Pages
Weight:1.08 lbs.
Dimensions:0.8" x 6.5" x 9.0"
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