Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period
- Editors: Stephen C. Behrendt, Harriet Kramer Linkin
- Pages: xiii & 207 pp.
- Published: 1997
- ISBN: 9780873527439 (Hardcover)
- ISBN: 9780873527446 (Paperback)
“[A]n excellent sourcebook. The essays are all concise yet specific and eminently readable. Many of the essays counter one another in terms of theoretical perspective and methodology, but such difference makes the volume all the more helpful to scholars and teachers, for it underscores the dynamism and diversity that the ‘rediscovery’ of British Romantic women poets has lent to the study of Romanticism.”
—Eighteenth-Century Studies
Although British women poets such as Charlotte Turner Smith, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Felicia Hemans were influential and widely acknowledged during the Romantic period, only recently have many scholars and teachers begun to rediscover, study, and teach their verse. This exciting recovery has brought with it challenges for the instructor wishing to introduce the poets’ works into the classroom: finding reliable and accessible scholarly editions, incorporating new writers into already-crowded syllabi, and dealing with entrenched notions of Romanticism. The contributors to this volume have undertaken, in the words of the editors, “the liberating and invigorating task of redrawing the landscape of Romantic poetry,” and in twenty-six essays they share their experiences and their innovations.
“This valuable collection of essays will, I would predict, open up the teaching of women Romantic poets in exciting ways. Well written, useful, grounded in the realities of university teaching, each one of these essays presents an innovative and original way of teaching poetry that has long been shut out of the canon.”
—Diane Long Hoeveler, author of Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within
