British women writers were enormously influential in the creation of public opinion and political ideology during the years from 1780 to 1830. Anne Mellor demonstrates the many ways in which they attempted to shape British public policy and cultural behavior in the areas of religious and governmental reform, education, philanthropy, and patterns of consumption. She argues that the theoretical paradigm of the "doctrine of the separate spheres"may no longer be valid. According to this view, British society was divided into distinctly differentiated and gendered spheres of public versus private activities in the 18th and 19th centuries,
Surveying all the genres of literature―drama, poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, and literary criticism―Mellor shows how women writers promoted a new concept of the ideal woman as rationally educated, sexually self-disciplined, and above all, virtuous. This New Woman, these writers said, was better suited to govern the nation than were its current fiscally irresponsible, lecherous, and corruptible male rulers.
Beginning with Hannah More, Mellor argues that women writers too often dismissed as conservative or retrogressive instead promoted a revolution in cultural mores or manners. She discusses writers as diverse as Elizabeth Inchbald, Hannah Cowley, and Joanna Baillie; as Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, and Lucy Aikin; as Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Reeve, and Anna Seward; and concludes with extended analyses of Charlotte Smith's Desmond and Jane Austen's Persuasion. She thus documents women writers' full participation in that very discursive public sphere which Habermas so famously restricted to men of property. Moreover, the new career of philanthropy defined by Hannah More provided a practical means by which women of all classes could actively construct a new British civil society, and thus become the mothers not only of individual households but of the nation as a whole.

Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Studies in Continental Thought (Paperback))

Literature & Fiction

Mellor, Anne K.

History & Criticism

Indiana University Press

Traces the life of Mary Shelley, describes her relationship with her husband and fellow writers, and discusses her major writings

Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

METHUEN

Mary Shelley

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &amp; Francis, an informa company.

Routledge

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &amp; Francis, an informa company.

Romanticism and Gender

Hardcover with dust jacket. Dust jacket is edge chipped and torn; covered with mylar. Foxed to edges of leaves. Boards are edge worn and scuffed.

Blake's Human Form Divine

Arts & Photography

Univ. Of California Pr.

English Romantic Irony

Anne Mellor here offers the conceptual framework for a better understanding of the Romantic writers. Her penetrating study yields new interpretations of Byron, Keats, Carlyle, and Coleridge. The Romantics have been seen as expressing a secularized version of a divinely ordered universe. Mellor emphasizes another strain in Romanicism, one linked to the philosophical skepticism and social turbulence of the age: a conception of the universe as random motion, as a fertile chaos that always throws up new forms.

Harvard University Press

British & Irish

The Last Man

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Luke, Hugh J., Jr.

Mystery

University Of Nebraska Press

Taking twenty women writers of the Romantic period, Romanticism and Gender explores a neglected period of the female literary tradition, and for the first time gives a broad overview of Romantic literature from a feminist perspective.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mellor, Anne K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mellor, Anne K.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mellor, Anne K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Studies in Continental Thought (Paperback))

Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

Mary Shelley

Romanticism and Gender

Blake's Human Form Divine

English Romantic Irony

English Romantic Irony

The Last Man

Romanticism and Gender

Mary Shelley