Jane Barker and the Politics of Catholic Celibacy
Jane Barker's amatory novel, Love Intrigues (1713), presents a snapshot of English Jacobite Catholic culture at James II's exiled Court in St. Germain-en-Laye. As evidenced in her Galesia Trilogy and poetry, Barker's narratives promote Catholic monasticism and its advantages for English women such as retreat, education, and the preservation of a feminist history. That the 1719 edition of Love Intrigues minimizes these overt Catholic emphases suggests that Barker's representation of Royalist Catholic solidarity in the first edition was too controversial later, due to recent and imminent Jacobite activity in England.
Montagu's Letters from the Levant:
As many critics have pointed out, Montagu's gender and class position gave her a certain author- ity to interrogate Western assumptions about the Levant in her Letters from the Levant (1716- 18). Scholars, however, have overlooked her nuanced examination of Ottoman-European rela- tions in part because she addresses European policies through an analysis of how they have permeated Europeans' behavioral traits, attire, and social conventions rather than through a conventional or theoretical analysis of the policies themselves. Just as European countries were gaining territory and expanding their influence across the globe, they were also creating more nation-based divisions within European identity and, to Montagu's disgust, signaling these boundaries more zealously the closer they were to Europe's intercontinental border with Asia. As an aristocratic woman, she is expected to comply with these practices. Because she refuses to do so, Montagu challenges a world order that seeks to carve the world up into European-controlled ter- ritories. She understands the cultural demarcations that prescribe certain behaviors but chooses a "proteophobic" stance, or one that resists the "spirit of faction" that develops among colonizers in foreign lands and is exploited to construct borders in these territories. Yet when she circles back to Europe, her travels to Africa expose Montagu as unthinkingly imbibing racialized portrayals of Africans that reinscribe the boundary between Europeans and Africans, perpetuating the very ideological "border form" that she so often critiques.
Re-visioning romanticism : British women writers, 1776-1837
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction READING WOMEN'S TEXTS Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context Becoming an Author: Mary Robinson's Memoirs and the Origins of the Woman Artist's Autobiography "A name more dear": Daughters, Fathers, and Desire in A Simple Story, The False Friend, and Mathilda Romantic Aspirations, Restricted Possibilities: The Novels of Charlotte Smith GENDER AND THE CULTURAL MATRIX Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writer and the Tradition of Dissent The Way Above the World: Religion and Gender in Welsh and Anglo-Welsh Women's Writing, 1780-1830 "Domestic Affections" and "the spear of Minerva": Felicia Hemans and the Dilemma of Gender*128 Lost Needles, Tangled Threads: Stitchery, Domesticity, and the Artistic Enterprise in Barbauld, Edgeworth, Taylor, and Lamb RE-VISIONING ROMANTIC AESTHETICS Female Botanists and the Poetry of Charlotte Smith Literary History, Romanticism, and Felicia Hemans The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility The Romantic Scene(s) of Writing English Romantic Women Writers and Theatre Theory: Joanna Baillie's Prefaces to the Plays on the Passions Bibliography Contributors Index