Romantic Interactions

Susan J. Wolfson is a professor of English at Princeton University and author of many essays on and editions of Romantic-era writers. Her books include The Questioning Presence; Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism; and, most recently, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsNote on TextsIntroduction: "The will of a social being"I. Two Women & Poetic Tradition1. Charlotte Smith's Emigrants and the Politics of Allusion2. Mary Wollstonecraft: Re:Reading the Poets3. The Poets' "Wollstonecraft"II. Gender Interactions, Generative Interactions: Two Wordsworths4. Lyrical Ballads and the Pregnant Words of Men's Passions5. William's Sister: Alternatives of Alter Ego6. Dorothy's Conversation with WilliamIII. A Public Attraction7. Gazing on "Byron": Separation and Fascination8. Byron and the Muse of Female PoetryNotesWorks CitedIndex

Susan Wolfson is not afraid to profess the study of literature. Her impressive body of work has reasserted the claims of close reading and formal literary values in the face (or the wake) of New Historical and other forms of social, materialist criticism which have tended to reduce poetic texts to the socio-political arguments that can be based on-or against-them. Yet she does this not in simple reaction to what has become a very prevailing trend in the field of Romantic criticism, but with a keen alertness to the moral issues raised in Romantic poetry, especially when they involve the status of women, and particularly women writers, then and now. The present book takes a further step in this direction by investigating poetic language and feminist issues, including the possibly 'feminine' valences of poetry itself. Its procedure is highly intertextual, reading texts back and forth, for and against, each other. New Books on Literature 19 2010 Wolfson employs historicizing criticism to study the relationship between Romantic authors' subjective agency and social connections. Choice 2011