The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry

This is the first extended study of the role gender plays in the writing, reading, publishing, and reviewing of poetry in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain. Ross examines the ways in which Romanticism has been constructed, from the Romantic period to the present, as a masculine enterprise. He then traces the growth of a “feminine” poetic tradition from 1730 to 1830, showing the importance of this previously neglected tradition in the understanding of 19th-century British culture, and the development of current literary history, theory, and taste.