Course Description
English Romanticism in the late eighteenth-century witnessed a burgeoning industry of women’s writings in various forms with efforts to challenge a field of patriarchal tradition which had long been occupied by male writers, and also, to create a “women area” exclusively of their own. This interaction of gender and genre is particularly striking in Charlotte Smith’s attempt to master a masculine voice in her Elegiac Sonnets and at the same time to express a feminine desire in her gothic romance The Old Manor House. This course will examine the way Smith constructs her female identity through generic transformation, gothic imagination and the exploration of the idea of property inheritance in her poetry and novel writings.