WOMEN TRAVEL WRITERS AND THE LANGUAGE OF AESTHETICS, 1716-1818 by Elizabeth A. Bohls ( 9780511582646 )

Item Details

Title:

WOMEN TRAVEL WRITERS AND THE LANGUAGE OF AESTHETICS, 1716-1818

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Format:

Electronic book text

List price:	£85.00
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ISBN 10:

0511582641

ISBN 13:

9780511582646

Publisher:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

2 February, 2010

Series:

Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 13

Description:

This study re-examines the genre of Romantic travel writing through the perspective of women writers.

Synopsis:

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.

Illustrations:

8 b/w illus.

Publication:

Imprint:

Cambridge University Press (Virtual Publishing)

Returns:

Non-returnable

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