Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818
  • Cited by 96
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2010
Print publication year:
1995
Online ISBN:
9780511582646
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582646
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1700-1830
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (13)
Information

Book description

British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travel in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces, and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the labouring classes, and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls' study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources at the peripheries of empire rather than at its centre.

Reviews

‘An important and serious contribution to the field … an interesting intervention in a growing field and Bohls’s consideration of women writers in particular is timely. Importantly, the argument of the book reverses the practice, prevalent in post-structuralist criticism, of isolating the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century away from their immediate cultural context. Bohls’s work, by contrast, explores the interaction between aesthetic ambitions and the practices of eighteenth century social life. In this respect Bohl’s book deserves much credit.’

Source: English

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.