Tracing Women's Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence

Routledge Studies in Romanticism

by Kari E. Lokke

Awarded the 2005 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize by the International Conference on Romanticism This book explores a cosmopolitan tradition of nineteenth-century novels written in response to Germaine de Staël's originary novel of the artist as heroine, corinne . The first book to delineate the contours of an international women's Romanticism, it argues that the künstlerromane of Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim, and George Sand offer feminist understandings of history and transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within. The book examines meditative, mystical and utopian visions of religious and artistic transcendence in the novels of women Romanticists as vehicles for the representation of a gendered subjectivity that seeks detachment and distance from the interests and strictures of the existing patriarchal social and cultural order. For these writers, the author argues, self-transcendence means an abandonment or dissolution of the individual self through political and spiritual efforts that culminate in a revelation of the divinity of a collective selfhood that comes into being through historical process.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published September 9, 2004

Reviews

[Rebeca F. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for anyone interested in Romanticism, that's focused on some of the most well known female voices within the movement and their echoes that still reverberate today.
It reflects on Mme. de Stael's "Corinne", seeing it as a critic to masculinist romanticism, and about the literary responses written to this book by Mary Shelley -"Valperga"-, Bettina Brentano -"Die Günderrode"- and George Sand - "Consuelo" and "La Comtesse de Rudolstadt", in which they tried to improve a feminist worldview and a particular approach to art and creation.
Through this common effort, these awesome women critiqued and gave life to alternative models to the reified romantic ones that were most masculinist and oppressive to women: the poetess or abandoned women, the self-absorbed and self-destructive melancholiac and the Byronic, Napoleonic or Promethean titan.
Their legacy is impressive.